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I can remember it like it was yesterday, it was a pretty spring day in 1993 and I was sitting in my third grade classroom. We were given children’s science mags and deliberating all of the fantastic gizmos inside that were due in.. THE FUTURE! Larger PCs, smaller PCs ( and even cheaper ones ), cameras with small screens that showed the photo you simply snapped, powerful games systems with-wait for it….16 BITS! Whatever those are!
The one thing that actually stuck with me though, was the automated vehicle. It had something like a GPS built in, where you would program in coordinates and the car would follow those directions. How it might sense other automobiles, traffic lights, and stop signs, I have no idea and it definitely failed to cross my mind at the time. The car was supposed to start on it’s own and drive to your destination, essentially chaffering you. And for some reason there would be a microwave in the dashboard.
At the end of the description was the sentence, Even a seven year old would be able to drive! Why, I was seven! That meant when this auto came out in the future, I might be ready to get one! Happy, I awaited the day my fabulous automated auto would roll off the assembly line. And waited, and waited and here I’m seventeen years later and the nearest thing to an automatic car is a strip of highway in japan that utilises magnets to drag your vehicle.
I do not get it. I am not currently in THE FUTURE, where’s all of the hi-tech stuff?
Companies have been advertising all the awesome things they will be putting out in the future since their formation, yet maybe only 1% of them ever reach the general public. More if they’re heavily redesigned. Why advertise something and guarantee to the public, but then not deliver? Duke Nuk‘em for good anyone? Actually the self driving auto has guaranteed to the general public as far back as 1939.
I’m actually unsure what to consider it, I can understand getting truly truly excited about a project solely to have it not pan out. But it has been over eighty years, where’s my damn car? There are so many hi-tech gizmos and products that haven’t ever been released, that there are entire blogs dedicated to all of the wacky things we should have owned. Or that we probably did manage to possess, but the product turned out to suck so much that the company went under. A good example of this were ‘videophones’, literally phones with a tiny screen showing you the individual you were speaking to, and have actually existed since the sixties. Of course their very high price and terrible visual quality have lead them to be almost non-existent.
One telephone product advertised but we sadly failed to see was the ATT wrist telephone in 1993, or really all versions of the wrist phone. I suppose shoppers finally didn’t want to seem like secret agents occasionally mumbling into their sleeves. I guess we’ll be more comfortable with that on our space resort being handed a mimosa by our robot house maid. Right before we chow down on our DNA data tablet and replicated food (Hopefully MIT will perfect that ‘Cornucopia:Digital Gastronomy project soon ).
Then again, they could just show up in different forms. Scientists have been attempting to create a safe exaggerate since the sixties. Last year we saw the coming of E-Cigs, all three hundred or so brands. Or they may develop, like cd’s into minidisks and minidisks into trash. I don’t know, we almost certainly will not have underwater cities or a gizmo we walk into that gives us a bath in a beam anytime soon… or ever. More than anything, I just desire my automated car. Then turn that automobile into a time-traveling auto.
Then return to 1993 and give my seven years old self that automated auto, therefore causing an ambiguity that may ultimately untangle time and implode the universe. But damn it, I can have that automated car.
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