Trust Tommy

Yesterday, I stayed at home because I was feeling crappy. I was kept company by Rick O’Shea’s dulcet tones coming from my phone. No, he didn’t call me — I was availing of 2FM’s radio app.

From my phone — yeah. Anywhere in Ireland I have mobile signal I can now listen to pretty much any national radio station.

In The Simpsons episode entitled “Lisa’s Wedding”, which originally aired March 19, 1995, Lisa goes to a fortune teller who predicts Lisa’s true love – in 2010. It shows many popular stereotypes of what the future was going to be like — a flickering hologram of an oak with a plaque that reads “in memory of a real tree”, robots clattering past (although we later see they’re simply walking towards auditions for the Wizard of Oz) and cars hovering.

Of course, we still have trees and cars still need to touch the ground, but that totally doesn’t mean we’re not evolving.

Look at iPods as a prime example — launched in October 2001, see how much smaller they’ve become in just over 8 years.

I think that this is the way technology’s going — smaller and more intelligent. Our phones can now find us anywhere on the planet as well as acting as cookbooks, gaming devices and wheelchair remotes. We can receive SMS updates for just about anything nowadays and even control things like Sky+ with just a quick message.

While I’m sure that we will see some new inventions, I think that a lot of it will be improvements on what we already have.

To quote XKCD — The future’s pretty cool!