YOU ARE NOW IN THE FUTURE

Jen sent this wonderful YouTube link about a Conan O'Brien guest talking about how "Everything Is Amazing, and NoBody's Happy."


It's sort of a neat coincidence (or cosmic luck,) that tonight I was talking to my older brother (57 year-old hippie who tunes pianos in Wisconsin - I could write a book), and we were comparing some futuristic 50's predictions, and how things actually turned out.


I loved how my brother put it - "We didn't get robots like we expected - we just got smarter appliances."


Instead of a robot to answer your phone, the phone became an answering machine - then cordless - then wireless. To clean your house, we didn't envision Dustbusters, bagless vacuums, carpet washers. In fact, wall-to-wall carpeting wasn't common until what, the 60's?


The Internet - Issac Asimov's "Multivac" in 1956; iPhone to a Star Trek communicator; H.G. Wells described portable television.. this was in 1899, folks.


If you were able to view the future in, say 1956 (year of my birth - yes, when dinosaurs roamed the earth), how would you describe these to the cavemen who lived back then?

- An iPod? DVDs?

- Electronic voting? (Well, at least when it works correctly; I'm still miffed that Gore lost in Florida back in 2000)


- How you could file your taxes on the Internet?

- How we use debit cards?

- ATMs - man, how did we live when you had to go the actual bank BEFORE 4 p.m. to get cash? Hmm... maybe that's why we are all so badly in debt - another topic for another time.

- Having closed-caption television (a necessity of life for me-of-limited-hearing)


- Using automatic sliding doors every time you go into the mall.... heck, what about MALLS?

And for goodness sake, a BLOG?


Now, granted, there are some things we all thought would have by now.


We would all be a heck of a lot smarter - we would have eliminated wars, disease, and have communities on the moon and Mars... and certainly better late-night television.


But hey, I'm very happy about the things I do have.