Now and then, I wonder about the high-tech future that is said to be upon us. Any minute, I’ll be able to have a routine outpatient injection of nanobots that will enthusiastically nibble away any arteriosclerotic plaque I may have, leaving me with an athlete’s blood pressure. They won’t make any mistakes at all, such as accidentally eating away my adrenal glands or my recollections of Intermediate Algebra. Super capacitors or hyper batteries will shortly be invented by brilliant marketing guys working in one of those modest double-overhead-door units in an industrial park, so gasoline will become as quaint as buggy whips. Autonomous vehicles will seamlessly take over from the accident-prone, traffic-jamming, human-guided kind. To commute to work, we’ll just go sit in the car (which has no steering wheel or other controls), sipping coffee and reading the paper, as a vast computer network integrates our transportation requests into routes, speeds and lanes. We won’t need driving licenses, and speeding will be impossible. I can even doze and my car will let me know that I have arrived by “dinging” like the clothes washer or microwave do. Because I may in the interim have forgotten where I was going, the destination will appear on a screen along with a happy face, urging me to “have a great day.” As I take the elevator to my tasteful corner office on the 40th floor, my car will route itself to a high-density underground auto-storage facility.
It might not be quite like that because the scheduled breakthroughs that the futurists predict actually come at their own speed or not at all. And some of the fabulous new technologies might be very expensive—not for everyone; maybe only for presidents, big-time CEOs and the Sultan of Brunei. So, I sometimes imagine a world in which some but not all of the science-fiction occurs.
