Techno-babble

Remember The Jetsons? The space-age 60s/80s cartoon which followed the adventures of an ordinary family in a future where ha ha everything has space- and technology-based names? And advanced technology has made day-to-day life so much easier?

I do. And guess what? It's now the future. And we don't have any of that technology. Where are the hovercars, the buildings on stilts, the robot maids, the Orbities?

Instead, technology's greatest triumphs include a website from which we can utter every non sequitur that pops into our head - and read similar entires from celebrities, friends, or whomever we wish. Why, just a quick glance over my Twitter homepage at the moment reveals that Rainn Wilson considers Lionel Ritchie the strangest celebrity he's ever sat next to on an airplane!

We also have cars that can map every street in the known universe; thus ensuring that you never need to use your brain to remember directions again, and a website that lets you look at the top of your house as it appeared at one particular moment.

Rather than coming up with useful, practical inventions to improve our day-to-day lives, technology is evolving in a different direction - one which creates distractions from said lives, and doesn't actually aid us whatsoever.

Do you agree with that?

If you do, you're wrong.

Here's why.

We're getting plenty of practical applications of technology in addition to the pointless sideshows. Technology is at its best when it's finding a way to eliminate some of the tedious processes of everyday life. Rolling coins used to be one of those tedious processes - loose change piled up over time, eventually you'd have to count out a certain amount of each coin, slip them individually into little paper sleeves, and take them to the bank, where you could exchange it for same-value bills.

Now, you can essentially skip all but that last stip - many bank branches have CoinStar or similar machines. All you do is dump your coins out of the Tupperware/jar/sock you keep them in and into the machine, and navigate them into a small slot - the machine divides them by type, counts them, and prints out a receipt, which you can then take to a teller to get the bills.

Okay Ryan, you're saying, but that's just one case - the exception, not the rule. The Jetsons had a machine that would instantaneously deliver food at the press of a button! How can anything match up to that?

To which I say: online ordering.

(What, you were expecting microwave ovens?)

Online ordering. Swiss Chalet, pizza places - any chains that deliver have already got this system in place, and I wouldn't be surprised to see more pick it up over the next few years. No, it's not instantaneous, and yes, you have to pay a fair bit more than you would if you were making the meal yourself - but you get decent-quality food sent to you without having to do any real work for it. How is that not the same idea?

(Well, okay, the Jetsons had to press a serious of buttons, we use a mouse. Graphical user interfaces were one thing nobody ever predicted about the future. Social networking being another.)

What about videophones? Well, what about videophones? There's very little practical advantage to them relative to the cost - most telephone conversations wouldn't be the least bit enhanced by being able to see the other person, aside from not being able to look at other things while talking - and for the few where it would be advantageous, we do have the technology...certain cell phones have videocalling capabilities - and, more obviously, webcams and Skype.

The thing is, we don't notice this stuff because it's so often such an insignificant part of our lives. It's the meaningless stuff - the Facebooks and Twitters, the GPS systems in cars - that we use the most, thus it's that stuff that seems like the greatest achievement.

But that's not the case. Just taking a brief glance around my room, I can spy all sorts of things which would have been fantasies even twenty years ago - something that can play essentially as much music as you want, with you dictating for how long and with no interruptions. A telephone that you can take with you wherever you go, and can fit in your pocket. A piece of plastic that has essentially made cash obsolete. A piece of metal that can secure your belongings from all intruders.

...actually, they probably had combination locks in the eighties, didn't they?

Still, my point stands. Today's technology isn't completely useless. We just like the useless stuff best.

--Ryan