This is a weird future

2004.04.13 — Culture | Future | by Andrew Cole

We live in the future.

It's not the far-flung future, where people regularly go winging across space to vacation homes on Mars, but it's still the future. We live in the future imagined in the 1950s, where Mother's life is made easier by labor-saving devices like washers and dryers, microwave ovens, dishwashers, and Swiffer disposable mops.

We live in the future where both parents and the oldest kid drive high-performance, fuel-efficient cars (compared to the 1950s) in safety undreamed of in the 50s. And Mother's life is so much easier that she has to enter the workforce if the family wants to keep up with the Joneses.

Every imaginable kind of electric and electronic gadget is available now at low, low prices. Act now and save! We have cell phones and cordless phones, CDs and DVDs, digital cameras, TIVO and video cameras, high-definition video, and so much more.

I occasionally see 19-inch televisions on sale for $100 (which has to be a loss leader). This is pretty cool, at least if you have a small room, but what's weird is what happens when you decide to buy it. Maybe you need a television stand, right? Well, an ordinary do-it-yourself television stand from Sauder or Bush generally go for, are you ready? $110.

Yeah.... Check the weekend ads. It may be cheaper to buy a 19-inch TV to put your 19-inch TV on top of than to buy a regular stand for it. As a bonus, you have a second TV—a picture-outside-picture of the low-end sort.

And we have the Internet.

Some people are playing down the importance of the Internet. But I think it's as important as the invention of moveable type. At no time has this level and speed of communication and interactivity been possible before. It has changed the way we do business, live our personal lives, do our shopping, and communicate with loved ones.

E-mail alone has reawakened the Western world to the art of letter writing. It can be a relaxed, informal note from a friend or a broad and formal communiqué from the corporate headquarters.

Less apparent but no less important is the way that companies use the Internet to send encrypted, specially-formatted messages from system to system. They order goods, invoice orders, pay invoices, and confirm deliveries with little or no intervention from a human.

We're still not driving flying cars like the Jetsons, of course. (Isn't strange that the Jetsons' car had no cargo space? Maybe major purchases all got delivered by cheap robot labor. Not much room for an engine, either.) Cars that drive themselves are supposedly coming soon, but we've all learned to believe things like that only when we see them for sale at Walmart.

Of all things that were supposed to be but aren't yet, it's the robots that I miss. We don't have talking robots, walking robots, working robots. Oh sure, there are talking robot toys, and walking robot demonstrators, and working robot factory assemblers, but it's not the same. There's no constant companion for the average guy, the Jetsons' Rosie for the housework. And robots that do exist are comically slow. Who imagined a future with slow robots?

Best of all: socially, we live in the world of peace and harmony imagined by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Louis Armstrong, a wonderful world. Despite the occasional squabbles and racial division, people of all ethnic and religious stripes get along together quite well, at least in the Western world, which seemed almost impossible fifty years ago.

It's not perfect, but hey, who's to say that George Jetson didn't live in the one and only floating city while much of the world just scraped by with subsistence farming?

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