When I was growing up, we were promised a lot of things in the future. I would watch cartoons and see these futurist impressions of the world I was going to grow up into. Now, looking back on it, cartoons aren’t meant to be accurate and I really shouldn’t have based any of my future predictions on the creative output of animators.
The hoverboard was delivered recently and it was meant to have come straight out of Back To The Future, but it was a poor second cousin at the very best. The board didn’t hover and only really caused a lot of accidents. If Marty McFly saw anyone riding the boards, he wouldn’t have even thought it was the same thing.
Somehow the hoverboard was not the biggest disappointment of my childhood dreams. I distinctly remember another form of transport which would have blown the hoverboard out of the water.
I know that I dream of flying around wearing a jet-pack. I saw these heroes on TV flying everywhere. They were like the normal person version of Superman. I grew up believing that I would also be using a jet-pack to head to the shops or to work. Walking would be a thing of the past and I was clearly heading in to the future.
It seems that my childhood TV watching lied to me. It might have over-promise and drastically under-delivered.
Then I woke up and felt ill this morning. My head was killing me, I had a fever and for some reason my ankles were swollen. I immediately turned to my phone and searched my symptoms. My watch told me that my heart rate was pretty normal but I had not had the best night’s sleep.
I had a video chat with my doctor from my bed and he asked me every question under the sun. I hadn’t been to any tropical islands recently, my mental health was pretty good and I hadn’t been drinking heavily the night before.
If I was to look carefully at my life, then it’s annoyingly obvious that my childhood viewing wasn’t lying to me. It had skilfully predicted most elements of my morning. I had just rolled over and picked up my mobile telephone, accessed the largest encyclopedia of human knowledge, had my heart rate monitored by my watch and my sleep pattern analysed before I had even pressed a single button.
When I watched TV as a child, they had predicted the invention of the mobile phone or a handheld communication device. They had predicted the ability to build and combine almost everything into the handset. Somehow the animators of children’s TV had out predicted the hordes of scientist who’s jobs it was to analyse the markets and predict the future technologies.
The only good news out of all of this, is that my folks were wrong when they told me that I was wasting my time watching the Saturday morning cartoons. I was really doing research for when I grew old.