Tuesday, January 17, 2006

I saw this on The Jetsons...

...and now it's real.

So this is what it's like to live in the future.

BTW, I have an urgent warning: do NOT apply the latest firmware upgrade to Rosie the Robot without first backing up all her preference files. I ran the installer immediately before my boss came over for dinner, with the result that Rosie dumped a pineapple upsidedown cake over Mr. Spacely's head. Consider yourself warned.

2 comments:

  1. A smart pill. It's great, until it comes time to retrieve the pill after it has passed. I wouldn't want that job.

    Concerning Rosie the Robot's firmware, at least you never got her data tapes mixed up. I had important investors over the day I accidently put in her Horrible Stomach Virus Simulator program. They ran out the door and I never saw them again.

    Hey, why do they even make that tape, anyway?

    ReplyDelete
  2. With only slight adjustments, that could have been an actual Jetsons episode. And that's precisely what made the show great. Stay with me on this for a moment...

    The Jetsons took that World's Fair-slash-Tomorrowland vision of a shiny technocratic utopian future that always works and turned it on its head by saying that the future would be exactly like the present...which has turned out to be precisely the case. George slaves away for a crabby unappreciative boss and grovels to keep his job in a world where computers are moody and unreliable, machines break down, and washing machines destroy our supposedly indestructible suits.

    To this day, "futurists" and Singularity buffs swear the end of history is just around the corner. Human nature is going to be repealed circa 2017, and from then on everything will work perfectly. The nanoswarms will never malfunction because they'll be ever so much better and smarter than we are.

    Stuff that, said The Jetsons -- we'll still have to walk our dogs and worry about our paychecks. I submit this was revolutionary at the time, and probably still is, although Futurama ably picked up the torch against rampant futurism for a while...

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.