Flying cars!!!

Where is my flying car? Seriously — every book about “the future” I read as a kid told me I’d have a friggin’ flying car by now! Instead, I have a Nissan Altima.

Sure, sure, there’s that guy who’s been trying to get the Moller Skycar to take off for years, but that doesn’t count. It’s too loud and too expensive and…too real.

When I was a kid, we had The Jetsons. Their cars zipped around with bright plastic bubbles and little whirring sounds. Or we had Chitty Chitty Bang Bang — that one just flew for no apparent reason. Any futuristic cartoon we watched had stuff that just flew in the face of the laws of physics.

More than just the flying cars, what happened to “the future?” I used to daydream about “the future” and all the cool stuff we’d have. Look at this 1961 article from “Weekend Magazine.”

We were supposed to have all sorts of stuff — personal rocket belts; trips to the moon; newspapers available anywhere, instantly…oh wait, that last one came true. How about being “whisked around in monorail vehicles at 200 miles an hour”? Um…we almost doubled that speed, actually. Indoor pools…check. Microwave ovens…check.

Wait, we’re getting sidetracked here –

The most important point: I HAVE NO FLYING CAR. I was promised this when I was 10-years-old. It’s time for the world to deliver on that promise.

Please tell me where to pick up my keys.

Decent robots. Robots that can clean around the house, do chores and heck … even keep you company. Robots with real artificial intelligence, that understand everything you say and can carry on a normal conversation. It’s sad to say, but if the best that robotics has brought us is ASIMO, we’re a long way from getting there.

I expected speech recognition technology to be a lot better than it is. It turns out to be a very tough problem to crack. How do you wreck a nice beach? I mean, how do you recognize speech?

Where are the cryogenically frozen astronauts and their space ships? We should have been finding monoliths on the moon and around Jupiter by now, I mean come on! Then some damn fool should have fallen asleep, gotten knocked off course, and ended up in some alternate universe with a bunch of damn, dirty apes or half naked space princesses! But noooooo, none of this is possible why? I’ll tell you why. None of this is possible because, we have no cryogenically frozen astronauts and their spaceships.

Where are my transporter beams? We have the comunicators, the wall televisions, and the mini computers (we call them desktops and laptops) in every home but, no transporters. Why can’t science get it’s head out of it’s ass and figure this one out? How hard can it be to figure out a way to transform my matter into energy and back into matter after trasmitting it thousands to millions of miles away?

Forget the damn flying cars! Where the hell are my flying, time jumping Delorians and steam powered locomotives? I mean come on! We’ve had the flux capacitor thingy for what 22 years now and no one has put it all together yet? I want to go back in time and see my grandpa when he gets out of the Navy after WWII so I can tell him something. Don’t sell the entire family farm that a race car driver now owns and, the land is now worth more in that area to a developer than our entire family makes in a year combined! Then I wouldn’t have to work for him on the land my own family used to own!

And where are the damn robots? I am not talking about the stupid, “Danger Will Robinson,” kind either. I am talking about the Cherry 2000 awesome looking “friendly” robots! I am talking about the clean my house, walk my dogs, babysit my kids, cook my dinner, and wash my car robots. Then if those don’t turn you on, where are the giant battle tank ones that I could rule the Earth with huh? Most sophisticated species indeed.

One last thing I am waiting for science to bring me, the underwater cities. When am I going to be able to go for a long walk at the beach without the damn pier? Why can’t I talk to dolphins and stingrays and learn the secrets of the universe from them? Why can’t I get up and look at the beautiful blue, sea sky instead of dull, gray clouds yet? I’ll tell you why, because some brilliant guy behind a desk that has never even seen the ocean, much less been in it, decides to send all our money for nautical research to a bunch of people living in a desert in the form of food. Now I am not complaining about feeding these starving people, well okay yes I am. Why are we sending them constant streams of supplies costing us constant flows of money when, some fat, cat warlord is taking it all and not giving it to the people who need it? And why are we sending these people supplies in the first place instead of trucks and trailers to move out of the DESERT?!? They live in a DESERT and nothing grows worth a crap there! Trust me I have been to them both in our country and others, there is nothing there they would miss. Let’s move them to green fertile lands and teach them how to grown food where it will grow. Then we can stop sending so much money to druglords and warchiefs and instead fund the research to build me a freeking sea world.

Wait that is it! Get the funding back to build a sea world that can float or submerge under water. Maximize underwater farming habitats and grow limiltless suppies of food in reusable, recyclable habitats. Then use that technology to figure out how to make my Delorian go through time to learn how to cryogenically freeze a guy. Then freeze the astronauts who can go find a monolith around Jupiter and get knocked off course on their way back to Earth and tear off into another dimension. In the other dimension they will learn how to transfer matter to energy and back again. Using this technology they will figure out how to transport themselves back to our time with all the answers to everything.

Now why hasn’t somebody else figured all that out yet huh? Damn that was easy!

Mac OSX Leopard. Only kidding. The first thoughts that speed into my head are jetpacks and flying cars, but I’m going to go with something slightly less predictable and choose wearable/portable computers instead. If you want to be picky about it, we’ve had wearable computers ever since the first pocket watch, but I’m referring to “real” computers, as they are commonly known today.

I can remember some earlier ideas back in the early ‘90s that had a separate monocle that used a monochrome LED display. Since then, these wearable computers with head-mounted displays have improved greatly, but are mostly used by the military in the form of mobile communications systems. The consumer end of the wearable-computer concept has morphed and merged into the portable computer category in the form of ultra-mobile PCs. We’re now seeing hand-held computers that have very close to the same computing power as a standard desktop computer. The most notable recent products that fit this category would be the Microsoft Origami, Samsung Q1 and according to some, even the Apple iPhone.

So is the wearable computer dead? Will it be replaced instead by ultra-mobile PCs because most people prefer the nice pretty screen to the head-mounted displays? Hopefully industry and consumers will choose one or the other. One company has apparently tried to combine the large screen size with a head-mounted display … with laughable results. And in case you were wondering … no, that photo has not been ‘shopped.

Flying cars – haven’t these been 20 years away for the past 100? We’re certainly not lacking the technology as the Oshkosh Experimental Aircraft Show demonstrates. So what’s holding us back? Is it litigation, regulation, or lack of consumer demand? Fear of flying?

How about a tiny Vaio-like Macintosh laptop with a battery that lasts six hours? I thought part of the reason for going to Intel processors is that they use less battery power? I can’t even get 2.5 hours out of my MacBook Pro.

We used to think that we would have a speedy wireless connection over the mobile phone network by now.

Well, it turns out that 3G, which has a theoretical data rate of 2.1 Mbps, delivers between 500kbps and 900kbps at best. These numbers don’t seem so bad, but the latency (the lag between a request and response) is just horrendous. To make things worse, 3G coverage is still spotty. That’s why fast wireless data connect is the technology that missed the mark for us.

Universal translator. Some sort of recording device that can take in any known major spoken language and spit out a reasonably accurate translation in another language. It would require a great amount of memory, but it must be possible.

I am a Ninja

Automated kitchens. Every year 2xxx thing I saw had some sort of automated kitchen that practically ran itself. Yeah there were hovercars, teleportation devices, even the good ol’ “interstellar ship in ever garage” thing happening, but I really wanted an automated kitchen.

No mess, no fuss, just the foods you like being pumped out. Harry Potter once had a platter that regenerated sammiches, where’s my totally plausable automated kitchen!?!?!?!?

We need Holographic movies, games and maps. like in star wars and anyother furture movie! “I want to play Chess with Holographic peices!”

Well let’s see, tech that was supposed to be here but isn’t…
Flying cars and robots are great, but let’s make it easy for ‘em…

How about an operating system that is actually useful for something other than killing your time…
How about an air conditioning system that doesn’t take a small loan to operate…
How about a pill to make your wife less naggy…
How about putting something besides plastic as a screen material on a monitor costing as much as a Kia…
How about a little help with the common cold?

But let’s just be thankful for what tech we do have at this point… if it weren’t for them little green men that crashed in Roswell in the 40’s, we wouldn’t even have the computer we’re using right now. Progression takes time… look at how far we’ve come from the 1940’s.

There’s my 2 cents.

I think I would have liked to see transport become cheaper, easier, cleaner and more convenient. Flying cars would be good, too.

Flying cars, moon bases, Rosie the robot, and a cure for cancer.

Encapsulated food pills. Where are these little baby’s? I mean we were promised the right to take one tablet and have the same nutrition and filling effect of a full meal. This would save time and increase productivity if only used at lunch time. We could all work at our normal times, but then instead of taking an lunch break, just take a pill with a beverage, and then right back to work. then you could either work till normal quiting time and make more money, or your employer could set hours back so that you would have more time to get home and enjoy the family, a hobby, or what ever else your little heart desires.

A true database-driven filesystem. WinFS should have happened by now. A true database-driven file system would make searching lighting fast, and more importantly, more customizable. Building indexes off of drive data is slow and cumbersome, and then querying that index is also slow and cumbersome. The entire process would be much more efficient and extensible were it centered around a database-like filesystem, complete also with journaling. I firmly believe the benefit of metadata in the everyday computing experience will not be realized until filesystems are more akin to databases.

Spaced base solar satellites eliminating the need for coal fired and nuclear powered electricity generating plants.

The ultimate alternative to fork and knive. And by this, I don’t mean chopsticks, no, but some kind of ‘knork’ or something.

How about 1080p/24fps, toshiba?