*

“Oh, man!” I mutter to myself as I turn the pages of my 1950′s Popular Science Magazine, way back when the mag is new and hot off the press.

“Oh, boy!” I’m looking at all the swell illustrations of what life in the 21st Century will be like and, checking my Boy Scout wall calendar, I see there’s a good chance I’ll be alive to see these predictions come true.

Just look at what life will be like in the year 2020, when I am elderly. Wall-sized television sets will entertain us by voice command, everybody will own a jet pack, colonies on the Moon will be readying their vehicles for Mars settlement, everybody will dress like Buck Rogers characters, and poverty will be a thing of the past.

Oh, yes, there will be robots to serve our every need.

Robots will do all the dirty little tasks and all the great big jobs for us, leaving us free to spend our time enjoying recreation, bettering our educations, improving our management of crimeless cities, reading all the great literature that workaholics in the 20th Century never could get around to.

Well, here we are in 2020. Everything came true, but in grotesquely disguised ways. Be careful what you dream of.

Jet packs exist in the form of drones. Everybody will have one any day now.

Large TV sets and computers arrive packed with their own nightmarishly mistranslated instruction manuals which only 7th graders can understand.

We can’t get up enough politics to settle the Moon, much less Mars, but we do fund satellites in large cluttered orbits.

Many of us don’t read books anymore.

We don’t dress like Buck Rogers, but we do love our week-long fashion trends…and isn’t that the cutest tattoo she’s wearing—wait, it might be a patterned stocking.

Poverty is still poverty, but we put lipstick on it once in a while to make ourselves less conscious of it.

And so on. The good, the bad and the ugly still exist side by side, but it’s all very shiny and disguised and, well, Modern.

Then there’s the thing about robots.

Robots serve us every moment of our lives. Computerized robotics run our refrigerators, toasters, alarm systems, automobiles, surveillance systems, communications networks, prisons, telemarketing companies, warfare readiness conglomerates, social media devices, city halls, political campaigns.

Yep, robots have made us so comfortable that we are only faintly aware that, in order to earn that comfort, we have to obey these robots, wait patiently while they re-boot our machines, carefully follow their instructions, maintain and finance them. And the worst thing that can happen is for us to be without these creatures for even a moment. The horror!

Where was I?

Well where I am is in the midst of spending hours hoping my IT guy can repair my busted computer this week, sitting strained but quiet while my wife and son spend hours trying to make the streaming function on our television set work properly, hoping against hope that The Cloud doesn’t crash with all my writings and records thereon, crossing my fingers to boost the chances that a sunspot burst won’t destroy my flash drives and troves of word programs upon which I depend.

I wait patiently and quietly for my robots to give me an all-clear signal so that life can get back to normal.

Back in 1954, I’m putting down my Popular Science Magazine and picking up an Astounding Science Fiction Magazine, which weaves tales of robots that will take over the world and eventually do away with humans.

Here in 2020, I’m becoming aware that the dominant population is now robotic, that we humans are the real robots, that at times robots act more fairly and justly than we do.

A twist in time is all it took for humans to become slightly unnecessary

© Jim Reed 2020 A.D.

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