Futuristic musings in Real Time

Jason Fry in his Wall Street Journal article Meet George Jetson reflects on our expectations and how some of them actually come to pass...only we don't really notice. At least, most of us don't seem to anyway.

The article doesn't focus heavily on speculative fiction classics. Mr. Fry uses pop references we can all relate to such as the Jetsons (hence the article's title). However, he does a nice job in condensing down many standard sci-fi story points where off-earth settlements are concerned.

I agree with Mr. Fry on his primary point: if you reflect back to the 70's, our current technology is very advanced. It's just rolled out so slowly that you didn't feel an almost shocking change in your life. But if you think about it like he does, didn't you actually?

Like Mr. Fry, when I loaded up my first iPod I was blown away when I walked off to the gym with that many songs at my disposal. It was the klunky MP3 player that prepped me for this invention, however. I had already loaded up songs onto a gadget only there weren't so many, the controls sucked and it just wasn't cool.

Other aspects Mr. Fry points out like cell phone usage are also very true. Again, the migration was very gradual. It started out with the huge shoe phone sized unit like Michael Douglas sports in Wall Street back in the 80's. We all knew such phones existed and only salesmen and construction workers lugged around the next generation Motorolas that were still quite large and heavy. Finally, the price came down and the phones got small and cute. So, adoption happened rapidly from that point on...but by then it was no big deal. We had seen them around for years...no shock factor was built into them.

I guess that's the thing to do...take Mr. Fry's exercise: think back to 30 years ago if you've got that many years under your belt. Heck, if you're 23, think back to when you were 8 -- lots of things have changed since you were a kid too. There was no TiVo 15 years ago, you couldn't shop online and your mom didn't likely have a cell phone you could call. Mr. Fry is correct in these points.

We are living in the age of the Jetsons in many ways. There just aren't any treadmills outside our apartments in the sky to exercise our dogs.