2010 - Techno Disappointments Continue (My Vision of the Future, Unwound)

A bit of an old story, I was born in 1963 and all I heard about when growing up was how much easier and peaceful and safe and great life would be in the 21st century...

This is a tale of a highly disappointed techno-freak.

My Cell Phone - my cell phone is too big, too heavy, reboots itself too often and does not have a strong singal 100% of the time. The battery needs charging nightly and more frequently if I actually use if for talking and not just for text or email. When will Star Trek - like communicators ever be the norm? Blue tooth devices don't count, they don't work consistently and they make the user look either pretentious or geeky.

My Laptop - much like my cell phone, it is too big and heavy and has a crap battery. My vision of a proper personal computer is a voice and touch activated model that is about the size of a book and as thin as a small town newspaper, with a battery that runs on combination of solar power and your body heat/pulse/electrical charges. Don't get me started on how NOT 21st century Windows is .... *yawns while waiting for this post to autosave* It seems that Mircosoft has an agenda that is intertwined with government "security" agencies and other bureaucracies that bog us down with unnecessary "over head" software. OPEN formats please !!

My Vehicle - no automatic, wing-like doors or voice command features. No auto drive home from the bar/club/in-laws program. Today's automobiles are still powered by the most popular, dirty and inefficient thing ever invented, the internal combustion engine. "They" haven't even invented a decent windshield wiper yet!!

Forget hovering, just give me a quiet, clean, efficient machine that looks futuristic and works well when I'm drunk, in bad weather and/or lost. One the automatically takes a fellow home, instead of to a girly bar, if it is after 11pm and shots of Jaeger were consumed.

My Music - today's music is awesome and while my Ipod is close to being perfect in size, power consumption and useability, this whole software and licensing thing is just a right pisser. Meanwhile, I have to fuck around either downloading things or copying CDs, while the I-tunes police check for legality.

In the movies, music just plays in the background when you need it. THAT is what I want!

My HD-TV - I absolutely love HD-TV. Two things prevent it from being nearly perfect.

First is that you have to pay out the ass for the programs AND they still include commercials/ads. WTF? I am not going to buy your crap, so stop pestering me. I buy food when I'm hungry and other shit when I need it. Would people actually stop buying things if there were no adverts? I think that we have evolved to be lazy enough NOT to make our own food, clothes, cars, visa cards - so no.

Secondly, there is nothing worse (actually there are a lot of things worse, like being burned alive or eaten by ants) than non-HD channels on an HD-TV. Very sickening to change a channel and momentarily think that you have glaucoma. Then again, we all know what the best treatment for glaucoma is..... *coughs*

Bio-IDs - this one irritates me, much like the computer and phone, because the basic technology exists and works, but has NOT been perfected. Lets get on with finger print and retinal and ear loop scans for shit sakes. This would eliminate the need for me to carry a wallet and keys and that alone improves my quality of life by 1000 fold (or a tri-fold). Bio scans can even become your plane ticket, concert ticket ... well you get the picture.

Perfect the technology and employ it already!!! Screw those paranoid fucks that think that our biology is the last bastian of personal privacy. That is nonesense, government has been violating our persons for a long time (hence the term "Washington is fucking me in the ass again").

Replacement Body Parts, Healthcare and Feeling Healthy - those that know me know that I believe that health care is an inalienable right. Also, you know that the company that I work for produces materials used in the joint replacement industry. According to the AMA, we are 5 years away from stem cell/matrix built organ replacements for all major organs (other than the brain, even though that will be possible - sans memories and all the shit that we learned during our life). Within 10 years we will routinely be able to use stem cells (God willing that the God fearing Right Wing allows us) to cure heart, kidney, bone and muscular deseases to include cancer.

My biggest fear is that the "pharmacutical companies" will fight this progress, just like the oil companies and the Taliban are fighting to keep the internal combustion engine the NORM.

(do you see a pattern emerging? I think that "Big Business" is screwing us out of my vision of the future!)

Synthahol - fake alcohol that gets you buzzed, but requires no hangover and can be reversed immediately with a shot. I suppose the only ones opposed to this would be farmers? The yeast lobby? WTF? If we can't force Detroit to build us a car that drives us home drunk, why not at least sober up the driver before starting the car?

Safe Sex with Holograms and/or Robots - about 250 people die each year in the US at the hands (feet, tentacles, transfer tables, pinchers) of robots. Sex with robots of the current vintage of technology is strongly discouraged. Holograms? Well they lack substance, being made of light waves, regardless of what SF movies tell us. As a youth in the late 60s and early 70s, my fascination with the female form and the future, really made me think that one day this reality would happen => a subservient, hot looking "partner" that gave you awesome sex, then cleaned your house, did your laundry, maintained your auto and home and cooked you dinner. If they even remotely looked human and carried on in light conversation and had soft, warm skin, you could certainly fall in love with them, thus fulfilling all of our human needs.

Huh. *looks dreamily into the air*

I could suggest that the "women's" lobby is the force preventing this from happening, but that would assume that women don't want the same things from a partner OR that using a fake person to do these things for them is somehow less fulfilling than badgering a real person to provide them. (j/k dear)

Of course the LARGEST impediment to robot/hologram sex is figuring out if using said methods of pleasure constitute "cheating". If it does then vibrators and porn would have to be cheating and THAT is a very slippery (yuck, you don't want to slide on THAT) slope => i.e. we are all cheaters. If sex with inanimate objects doesn't constitute cheating, then sex with a passed out, drunk young woman is okay even though some police, judges and loved ones think that it is almost like rape, sort of.

Back in 1972, at age 9, I never realized that the future was going to be so full of ethical dilemmas.

Space Travel, Time Travel, World Travel - the title alone almost says it all!

What is the point of having a future if you can't travel to it and bring back cool shit to patent and get crazy rich on or take over the world with?

What's the point of having a past if you can't go there and break up your mom and dad's first date and never be born?

No Need for Money - most futuristic movies depict society as being quite communist, were we all live in peace and everyone has a job to do that contributes to the overall benefit of society and there are no wars, no money and things usually work really well until some crazy guy wants to take over the world with the help of lizard-like accomplices from another galaxy.

Except for the last part, that all sounds really good to me.

Hopefully, China will continue to buy our debt and some day foreclose on America, imprison the Western world in a cooperative state, use their free, western, graduate level, engineering education to develop all of the above technology and send us all into my vision of the future.

Hopefully !