Yesterday Meets Today

It seems that most science fiction movies and T.V. shows from the 1950’s through the early 1970’s predicted that by now we would be a technologically advanced society assisted by robots and flying cars. I have yet to see a flying car on I-10, other than the one’s with drivers that regard 75mph as the suggested minimum speed limit. Barring the George Jetson like conveyances, we are close to some of the predictions though we may not notice it.
Technology is usually sifted into use until they become an integral part of our daily lives whether we realize it or not. There is probably no better place to see this than in the home. One of the leaders in the introduction of home technology is the appliance maker LG. They sell a digital multimedia refrigerator/freezer. This fridge has many features to accommodate the perceived needs of the home of today or tomorrow. With functions that range from Internet connectivity for emailing, to voice mail retrieval, and downloading mp3’s and recipes. This fridge sports a LCD panel on the front that acts as the interface for the device. It can also track the quantity of food inside so that you know what you are in need of before visiting the store. I almost forgot, it also has an icemaker.
In the same spirit of home technology communication, a company named NDS has developed a distributed DVR. Unlike regular DVR’s that record or download movies and T.V. shows to a hard drive in a TiVo like machine connected to your television. The distributed DVR will allow users to view content from any hard drive that is on their homes wireless network.
A constant of the sci-fi genre of yesteryear is the presence of robots or some sort of artificial intelligence. Well, they do exist today, though they may not look like we expect. Two of the early home robots to gain popularity were the Roomba robot vacuum and the Aibo robotic dog. I think that the next robot to find a warm reception in homes will be the SCOTY or Smart Companion Operating Technology. Philips Electronics is the maker of this two-foot tall, six panel home robot. SCOTY has many of the cool features that we expect from robots. It is an intelligent media hub that can play songs from your computer, turn off your computer, and read your emails to you. SCOTY can identify people with it’s face recognition abilities and alert you by email when someone unfamiliar to it enters the room. I think that two of the coolest features about the SCOTY are that it operates using voice commands and that it costs a little more than a 30GB iPod.
I like the convenience of technology as much as the next person, but I realize that these new technologies often come with the sacrifice of privacy. I’m not sure that I want the contents of my refrigerator to have an Internet connection.