Innovation is Moving Quickly

Ladies and gentlemen the future is today. You can drive a car that parks itself. You can plug in that same car and not use hardly any (if any) gasoline. You can have a self-propelled lawnmower that only needs you to make sure that it does not take out the garden gnome, or the prize winning rosebushes. All this technology, talking to your computer, working from home, and then another cool invention comes along. Now you don’t even have to vacuum your own floor! You can find robots that will mop or sweep your floors. All you have to do is push a button.

One of the biggest sellers on the market is Roomba. They are so good you can even find roomba coupons online to help with the cost of this modern convenience.

George and Judy Jetson would be proud to have a Roomba take some of the work off Rosie, their maid, and Rosie could sit back and enjoy a nice chilled can of 10W-40 on a hot summer day.

You can take your phone with you just like Star Trek, and you can even take your computer with you, stored nicely away in your shirt pocket or a side pocket to your purse or briefcase. You can get advice from your doctor via web-cam and still make it to your lunch date across the planet.

I cannot even imagine what the next big thing will be. It is so fun to think about what is and what should be. Consider that third arm that every mother would love to have. She could knit or crochet at the same time she’s taking a drink of her iced tea or changing the television by remote control.

We had it made in the 21^st century, but there is so much innovation just in the past decade that things that came from 1995 are obsolete. How would you like to have a big old box computer with a monochrome monitor and a 20MB hard drive? Would that not be grand? You might be able to store two or three of your photographs on it, provided you could get your USB memory stick to talk to the old technology. I can just imagine the little green block cursor blinking at the end of a running line of ERROR.

Now we have phones on our wrists, google on our eyeglasses, and GPS as standard equipment. OnStar can unlock your car from a radio-signal, and kids get bullied relentlessly thanks to all the devices you can use to reach social networking sites.

News is 24/7 and we are inundated by it, but is it news? Is it mind-control? Is it informative? Do we need to be informed every second of every day? The rapid advancement of information, rhetoric, and 'news' may be harming us all. Is all technology good? Is all advancement good? The 1980's started the immediate gratification with our lives of excess. Today, we are looking at knowing something before anyone else, not at the same time. Innovation: positive or hurtful?

What would you like to see as the next big thing? I’d love to have a device that can take me back into time, but so do a lot of people. I’d be so ready and willing to change my future by kicking my old self in the pants and helping me to make the right choices for today. But that is not going to happen in my lifetime, unfortunately. However, wouldn’t it be great to have a device that goes on your head and automatically inputs knowledge into your brain? We would not have to worry about 12 years of medical school, from pre-med through all those internships and residencies. We would be auto mechanics in a matter of minutes.

Innovation is wonderful and necessity is the mother of all invention--sometimes. I wonder whose necessity it was to require robots to wash your kitchen floor, or to have a computer that could actually keep up with the typists who do about 120wpm. Now you can talk to your computer, just like on Star Trek! I wonder who it was who decided that the Lunar Module should be built, and who decided that supersonic airplanes are a good idea?

Whoever it was, I hope they keep it up. It’s not a bad thing to keep moving forward. However, it is a bad thing to stop thinking for yourself. Don’t get too busy with your life that you forget to live. It’s the simple pleasures, like washing your own car or steam cleaning the carpet; those actions make us human beings. The satisfaction of a job well done is always in good form.