October 15, 2013
Jean Harlow and Marie Dressler
I”m not the first to make the unfashionable and more original observation that”all those jabbering Nostradamii to the contrary”our lives really haven”t changed that much in the last fifty or sixty years.
For example, the only new standard-issue kitchen appliance is the dishwasher.
(That sticky white rectangle gathering dust on your countertop doesn’t really count, does it? How often do you use yours, really? A cute running gag on Canada’s Murdoch Mysteries sees the Victorian detectives pondering how the “new” discoveries they learn about in each episode”radiation, telegraphy”will be used by generations to come. But like most every era’s proposed “futuristic” contraptions, especially those conceived before miniaturization became feasible, the detectives’ imagined devices are ever so slightly “off””some existing object, just with added dollops of hideous, superfluous bulk. After learning about the existence of microwaves, Officer Crabtree is roundly mocked for proposing that one day, every household will have its very own “potato cooking room””that is, a microwave oven.)
And all these appliances and more are powered by electricity generated by the same old boring sources instead of solar or wind or tiny nuclear power plants in your basement. We still talk on phones and type on keyboards, endure painful, bloody surgery and (most annoying to many, from the sounds of it) drive earthbound automobiles.
“Where’s my flying car?” jokes every barstool bore ever. We already have “flying cars,” moron. They’re called “helicopters.” Personal aviation technology isn”t what’s lagging”it’s the infrastructure of chopper-friendly landing pads and fueling stations (and reams of new legislation, regulation, and insurance underwriting) that would make them feasible automobile substitutes.
Given their pedestrian predictions and uninspiring success rate, I can’t help but wonder:
Do futurists ever worry that machinery will take their place?
