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Robot Toilets

Wait a minute, what’s the date? It’s the year 2002 Anno Domini by the old Gregorian calendar, correct? That would put us far enough into the Twenty-First Century for me to start wondering. Not in general, but about why we are so far behind schedule with those fantastic bits of technology we were told to expect round about this time. Popular Mechanics and other slick, forward looking publications used to slather on about these things to get us anxious for someone to invent, build, and sell them on the open market. It’s what I used to get a metaphorical hard-on about long before I knew what a literal one was meant for.

Where are the robots? I mean the real ones: where is the highly-motivated, self-actualized machine that washes your car, takes your dog for a walk, and prepares a tasty pasta dinner for five, all while it calculates your income tax payments for the next seven years? It was explained these electronic wonders would by the start of the century walk and talk and react to our every whim with nary a complaint. It’s possible the futurists got it a little wrong, and a robot’s mobility will be based on wheels, or tracks, or four instead of two legs, much as the pet-like Sony Aibo has. But the Aibo can’t take out the trash, nor will it any time soon — though it probably looks very determined as it watches you do it. In any case, it doesn’t meet the criteria for a real robot, so we’ll consider it a crude and ineffectual prototype, albeit a cute one.

And what about the jet pack? Everyone should remember the film of a guy in a business suit strapping this to his back and popping off for a jaunty hover. Jet packs were going to revolutionize personal travel, and make bumper to bumper traffic a thing of the past. Never mind that they’d cause a different, air-based, more dangerous version of congestion. No one said progress was going to be safe. I’m quite aware of how fuel consumption never made them all that feasible, and that they burn off propellent so fast you can’t get further than the curb without sputtering to a halt. The point is, no one ever mentioned how big a task creating a real-world product would turn out to be, but they spent lots of time promising individual jet transport would be a reality. So dammit, I want one!

Speaking of ways to travel, the automated automobile was supposed to have shown up, as well. If we can’t have a jet pack, the least they can do is make sure our car can do the driving. There’s nothing down the street at the Chrysler distributor that mentions these. I checked. And what about Maglevs? Our trains were supposed to travel on a magnetized cushion of air at speeds exceeding two hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. Now that’s something I’d give up car travel for. They’re only now talking about high-speed train service being made available in my area, but using old-fashioned, stuck-to-the-track trains. And high-speed to them means in the neighborhood of 120 kph. How very nice…

Another scientific marvel I’ve been waiting on is the two-way television phone. That never advanced far from the version I saw in a technology museum when I was nine. Trying to hook up a high-bandwidth communications tool that a TV monitor with camera becomes, and not having a good plan for replacing the current network of aging and inadequate phone lines, turned out to be a fairly idiotic move on the part of the phone company (remember when they were capitalized as The Phone Company?). You can argue that a computer with an Internet connection and a Web cam does a pretty good job of impersonating it. So I’ll give them that one, but they only get partial credit.