Meet George Jetson

The other night, I was up much later than I should have been and the TV was on. An old silent movie came on and I watched it for a few minutes. It made me think about how amazing it must have been for people to go to the first “talkies”, where sound was introduced to the moving images

When I was a kid, I used to watch a TV cartoon titled “The Jetsons”. It was about a space age family living in outer space. They zipped around in personal spaceships to go to the grocery store or to work. Rosie, their robot maid took care of all the housekeeping duties. One of their household devices was a TV phone. It worked like a regular telephone, except you could see the person you were talking with on a live TV screen. Sometimes, they would wear masks to improve the way they looked to the other caller; especially if they just got out of bed.

I can’t help but think of the Jetsons when I use the webcam to skype a video call, as I did with Jamie a few days ago.

And what about those Star Trek communicators? How much more could they be like a Nextel cell phone? They even flip open.

So, fantasy eventually became reality. We knew how we wanted technology to serves us before we knew how to do it.

I’m pretty sure that keyboards will be obsolete before too long. They are already on their way out with phones. And as far as computer screens go – at some point people will look back at these flat 2 dimensional screens and shake their heads the way we now do at typewriters. What we want are the holographic interactive projections like you see in the IRONMAN movie.

Then I started to think backwards to when technology first started to impact us. And by “us”, I mean humans.

In my opinion, the advanced technology as we know it can be traced back to a single invention. There is an irony to its pivotal position in history.

Do you think you know what it is? It’s not the computer, by the way. Come on, give me a break.

Anyway, I’ll give you my answer in the next post.

Well, not my next post...but the one after