TECHNOLOGY PART 3

I am very annoyed with the state of our technological world. By my reckoning, we are living in the Age of the Jetsons. For those of you who grew up under a rock, The Jetsons is an animated television sitcom that first aired in 1962 and continues in syndication. It was set in a futuristic utopia and followed the misadventures of a typical American family of the late 1950’s.

I see scant evidence of the robots and other labor-saving devices that were supposed to be transforming our 21st century lives.

Oh sure, we have robotic vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers. These devices have sensors to guide them as they move about a house or lawn. They do a pretty good job at their assigned tasks. But, they’re dumb. The vacuum cleaner can’t climb stairs. Nor does it have a sense of humor like Rosie, the Jetson’s robotic housekeeper, does.

There’s nothing cheap about these robotic items either, especially the mower. Cutting the grass is fine. But I can get the next-door neighbor’s kid to do it at the fraction of the cost. If I’m going to spend ten-thousand dollars on a robotic mower, it should do more. Weeding the flower beds and automatically dispensing beer on a hot day would be nice.

I’ve seen supposedly, human-like prototype robots (they’re made in Japan, where else). Quite frankly, they have a long ways to go. Their creators say the objective is not to have them look exactly like us. That’s good because they don’t.

Their robots are more functional than aesthetically pleasing. They are meant to be used to assist the elderly and handicapped. There’s one small glitch though — the robots tend to drop things or walk into walls. Probably traits not very conducive to “helping” someone, unless it’s into a hospital.

And where the heck are those aerocars? By now, we were supposed to be flying about in personal flying saucers. I feel cheated.

Don’t try to tell me that the people who figured out how to send a man to the Moon can’t figure out how to get a car to levitate. Like most really innovative, nifty ideas, it probably just suffers from lack of funding.

Plus, I think it would be difficult to enforce traffic lanes in the sky. And there’s the little issue of what happens should your source of propulsion fail. It may be a nasty fall back to Earth, which could make for a helluva liability issue.

But still, the thought of having a flying car is provocative. Think of the possibilities? Waiting in long lines for a commercial airline would be a thing of the past. Getting stuck in a traffic jam would no longer be an issue — you’d have additional dimensions available to get around it.

You’d just hop aboard your zippy personal flyer and whisk yourself away to an exotic locale. Instead of flying over the Grand Canyon at a distance that makes it look like a minor hole in the ground, you could get up close and personal. You could chase buzzards. Heck, why not have some fun doing close fly-bys over Earth-bound tourists?

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