The “Jetsons” List

Or, “Where are my flying cars?”

What was once laughable is now matter-of-fact. That’s no revelation, but it hit home when I was telling a friend about the new household lightbulbs that have a battery built in. (When your power goes out, they provide light for a few hours.) Coincidentally he too had one. I told him that putting it in your mouth connected the circuit and he immediately did so, just like Uncle Fester… and it lit up! And the transition from sci-fi to fact hit me one more time, realizing just how much it has accelerated.

In 1967, at a national Boy Scouts of America get-together in Utah, I think it was, I saw a guy fly in the air with a rocket pack strapped to his back… forty two years ago and still no flying cars. But some would say that’s not exactly true… there are many car-airplane hybrids that already fit the bill. Be that as it may, we still don’t have people routinely flying around on their daily commute; not even close. Prototypes of hovering personal vehicles are apparently just that, prototypes.

But by another count, the future is already here. And as some pithy person remarked, perhaps William Gibson, “the future is already here… it’s just not evenly distributed.” In fact, in a bit of a reversal, some of the most futuristic things are also the most widely distributed, namely the smartphone. Every day it gets closer to the mythical tricorder of Star Trek fame. What first got me thinking about the Jetsons List — all of the things that were laughable yesterday but matter-of-fact today — was when I was rewinding live television (by using my DVR). This would surely have been a laughable notion a few years ago. Yes, we all think we could have imagined this sort of thing, like oracles of the future when we have the future in our hands, but only a precious few can escape the mental shackles of the present, such as in 1987, to even imagine something as far-fetched as rewinding live TV.

With that introduction, let’s enumerate, classify, and analyze to death, the Jetson’s List!

Been There, Done That

• The cell phone. No I won’t analyze everything.
• The internet… the entire world, wired, including everything good, everything bad, and all of your identity, passwords, finances, and privacy. Have a nice day, Mr. or Ms. 187–81–6517.
• DVR. (Don’t worry, the list will get more interesting, and scary.) When will we have digital capture of our car audio, meaning my old-fashioned FM radio? Probably a geezer question ‘cause I should be using my phone anyway, or it’s already in Teslas???
• Same day delivery. Say what you want about Jeff Bezos (go ahead, I’ll wait here), but he single-handedly forced the world to deliver without all the waiting. My old boss had a stupid saying: “Remember before computers, if you ordered a magazine, they’d say ‘Please allow 4–6 weeks for delivery.’ Now that we have computers, they say ‘Please allow 4–6 weeks for delivery.’” Computers didn’t do it; Jeff Bezos did.
• Every person on earth is a cab driver. Who saw this coming? Uber has at least three civilization-changing phenomena wrapped up in it. There’s the ‘gig economy,’ which is a nice way of saying piecework; there’s the customer service miracle of eliminating all the slop in the nightmare of getting a cab ride; and there’s the enslavement of all of us to whoever owns the database for a category, whether cabs, beds, plumbers, all retail, information, and so on. Twenty years ago could you have imagined that the ultra-future would mean you push a button and one of a thousand neighbors gives you a ride in his or her car, pays for its insurance, tires, repairs, and gas, and makes $3 for an hour’s work? Wow, this future is great for someone. Of course that’s not the ultra future, that would be…
• Self-driving cars. Not exactly here yet, but it’s inevitable even if the “last mile” takes another 10 years. The main surprise for most of us was that it would have been expected to rely on wires in the roads, but it’s all software. Of course.
• Massive overdose by software. In the story of the UCSF overdose, a patient survived being given a 38-fold overdose of a powerful drug, dispensed by a robotic pill machine. You thought all of the Jetsons’ List was gonna be good stuff? Well, this ain’t no TV cartoon; we’re talkin’ real Jetsons here. I work in software, so I’m very careful when I blame software as the problem, because in the vast majority of cases, that’s scapegoating. Instead, in most cases a lot of human mistakes are made that create a problematic software system, period. But recently things have gotten complicated. In fact, in this story, although the drug was dispensed by a software system’s robot, the drugs (lots of pills) were manually administered by a nurse over the course of perhaps 2 hours. A whole chapter in a book covers this nightmare, so I’m not going to convince you it was “solely” a software problem — it wasn’t — but it most definitely was a futuristic software problem compared to years ago. This patient nearly died because of the complex world of software. I said I work in software, but more specifically, user interface design. And I can tell you that this problem was because of bad software user interface design, specifically something called “choice of controls.” In this case, a dropdown list was used when, instead, an option button set should have been. In fact here’s a lengthy audio-visual rant on the problems of dropdown lists. Here is the original screen:

And here is a simple correction that might have saved one near-death:

• Death by software. A mere overdose? Hell, sooner or later someone would die. In this incident a patient was given the wrong drug because of the wrong choice being made from a dropdown list, in what sounds like a problem of choosing the wrong “auto-suggested” item. Yikes. I haven’t studied the details of this one carefully, but it doesn’t matter. This had to happen sooner or later. In fact I wrote a satirical prediction of exactly such a poor autosuggest choice somewhere around the time of the Iraq war. But I didn’t presume a mere fatality… I posited the annihilation of Mankind in a volley of automatically launched, “deterrent” nuclear weapon strikes. Go big or go home, right?
• Mass death by software. Single fatality, that’s the best you can do? C’mon. The recent crashes of two Boeing airplanes have been narrowed down to an engineering flaw in which the planes had a tendency to rise upward, so they thought they’d fix it by installing software that told the plane to go back downward. Brilliant! Hell, I could be an aerospace engineer. Did they consider fixing the underlying engineering flaw? Of course they considered it… and promptly dismissed it. Do you know the answer to all “why” questions? It’s m-o-n-e-y. The plane probably nosed up because they took the cheapest approach to stretching the plane to put more customers into it, and ruined the fundamental aerodynamics. Now, just like the overdose problems, I initially hesitated to call this a software problem. This was an arrogance and greed problem; I’ll bet if you dig deep enough you’ll find that the engineers argued for the right engineering solution. But ultimately a software fix was applied to the engineering problem, and the software design — conception, implementation, and training — had enough holes in it to kill hundreds of people. Put another way, if the plane were to have been similarly stretched “in the olden days,” before software… those people wouldn’t have died. Instead, the pilots would have pushed down on the control yoke/stick and the plane would have evened out.
• Private Car Company: Not only did Elon Musk break the stranglehold of ‘big auto’ but he made a car that got a perfect 100 on Consumer Reports right out of the gate. This is more of a miracle than a futuristic thing in the ‘flying cars’ sense, but it’s pretty futuristic too.
• Reusable Rocket: Not exactly something you and I dreamed about but Elon Musk did.
• Private Space Companies: When it gets to the point where it takes an Elon Musk to force a Jeff Bezos to compete or be embarrassed that he doesn’t have a rocket company, you know it’s not the 60’s anymore… and this is not your father’s jet pack anymore.

Not Yet

• The Fountain of Youth: Don’t tell anyone but I believe 100% that this will happen in my children’s lifetime… https://medium.com/@jbellis/why-humans-will-stop-aging-in-2048-e531fc3abb48… the ‘taint of quackery’ notwithstanding.
• Time travel: Sorry, not optimistic. Guess I’m just not a futurist.
• Weight control: Probably happen when they figure out the aging thing. The same tools that led to the solution will enable controlling the metabolism and brain.
• Cure for cancer: Or even the common cold. See Weight Control. Seriously, cancer is probably the same thing as aging in many ways.
• Whirrled Peas: Hmmm. If we ever discover life on another planet, I’ve speculated that we’ll probably find Arabs and Israelis fighting there, too. But nonetheless, I guess I’m optimistic that we’ll continue to get more peaceful over time. Lots of time.
• Flying Cars: They just need to incorporate helium to offset the tare weight. One hundred pounds can be lifted by 1,500 cubic feet of helium. So, a rounded rectangular tube around the ‘car’ about twice the size of a Grand Canyon whitewater raft should do it. It will be bigger than a car, but not monstrous. “Hybrids always win. (jb)”

What did I leave out?