Growing up watching cartoons, watching the Jetsons made me want to live in the future. That silly cartoon of the sixties posited a colorful future not noticeably more dysfunctional than the present, and yet it appeared to enjoy the benefits of technological marvels inaccessible to us. According to Hanna Barbara, the world of the Jetsons’ flying cars, robot housekeepers, food synthesizers, and jetpacks is right around the corner – 2012 to be exact (when the Jetsons took place).
What We Have Now
Although flying cars and jetpacks seem to be a little way off, there are some cool technologies that seem to be right on point with the Jetson’s future picture…Here are a few examples:
Workstations. George Jetson is often pictured at his desk with multiple flat monitors around him while he twiddles away on a bank of buttons.
Video Conferencing. The computers often show video of his boss, Mr. Spacely as they talk back and forth, usually involving George getting fired. I wonder if Web Ex knows about this footage?
Moving Sidewalks. In many of the episodes, the characters don’t walk, but rather step on a moving sidewalk, much like what’s employed at many airports across the globe.
Video Games. Elroy played on an Envirosimulator much akin to today’s super realistic video games. Even George played cards with a robot for fun.
Robots doing work. In almost every episode of the Jetsons, there was at least one robot accomplishing some task. Sure we have industrial robots building cars and welding meta. Even robots vacuuming our carpets, but none of them talk back with artificial intelligence.yet.
Fooderackacycle. Sure we don’t have robots making our food yet, but we do have machines dispensing it¢â‚¬â€vending machines. And not just the old vending machines where food drops to the bottom but ones where arms retrieve the requested snack and even heat it up automatically upon purchase.
Super fast mail. In some of the episodes, they could mail something and have it delivered almost instantly. Sure it was a physical envelope, but today’s e-mail is the next best thing.
Virtual Pets. In several episodes, they have pets that aren’t animals at all, but interact like it. We have those too, called Webkinz and other online pets for kids. Sure it’s not a hologram of the pet, but it is indeed virtual.
Coming Soon
What is even more exciting is looking at the technology that is still in the prototype stages. The things that will become part of our lives in the next few years that is distinctly Jetsonian in nature.
Winged Chevy
Flying-car enthusiasts are justified in their pessimism: For the past hundred years or so, they’ve repeatedly been promised that a future with a personal aircraft in every garage is just around the corner, only to have their high-flying dreams cruelly smacked down with words like “safety” and “physics.”
But now, after so many years of empty promises and false hopes…here are some more: The Federal Aviation Administration has finally given approval to the Terrafugia’s Transistion, a flying car – or “roadable aircraft” as the company likes to call it – that will soon have us all living like the Jetsons. Honest.
According to Terrafugia‘s website, the Transition’s rear propeller gives it a cruising speed of 115 m.p.h., and it’s 20 gallon tank – which takes regular unleaded gas – gives it a range of 460 miles. On the ground, the vehicle’s gas mileage is a not-too-shabby 30 miles per gallon. The anticipated purchase price is $194,000, just slightly more than the cost of a new iPad (the gold-plated kind).
Approval from the FAA was delayed because of the Transition’s weight. As Wired notes, the vehicle’s 1,430 lb. curb weight was 110 pounds over the legal limit for a Light Sport Aircraft, the kind that requires only 20 hours of practice before they hand you a license. But the FAA has now granted a dispensation to the Transition, meaning that it will still be able to carry safety features like airbags and crumple zones.
The tech blog DVICE is skeptical. “Think of how much quicker you’ll be able to pick up the kids from school with this thing!” writes Adam Frucci. “And how much more likely you’ll be to crash into the top of a house on the way home!”
But hey, at least it will have airbags.
Flying cars have actually been around since the late 1940s. After all, anyone can take a small plane, pull the wings off, aim the thing down the interstate, and claim it’s a car. Some designs have been cleverer than this, of course, incorporating engines that can turn both propellers and wheels, removable wings, steering wheel-joystick combinations, and so forth. Not surprisingly, the price for this convertibility tends to be decent cars that are lousy planes, decent planes that are lousy cars, or more typically, lousy planes that are lousy cars too.
People can just be so twentieth-century sometimes.
Team Rosie
Meet Rosie, a real-life robot named after the Jetsons’ wheeled maid and designed and built by a company called RedZone in Pittsburgh. She weighs 14,500 pounds, looks something like a very large sideways refrigerator on four wheels, and has a telescoping boom mounted on her top. She’s controlled by a human sitting some distance away–the distance being a good idea since Rosie earns her keep by excavating radioactive material from decommissioned nuclear reactors.
Rosie is typical of today’s state-of-the-art robot, in that a) she is designed to perform a highly specialized, somewhat technical task that humans are probably a lot better off leaving to something less than alive, b) she is dumb as a doornail, and c) she is pretty much the last thing you’d want serving drinks in your living room.
Why do robot labs tend to turn out such social misfits? Because no one knows how to build a robot that recognizes spoken English, doesn’t bump into furniture, can safely wield a dust rag around a vase, and for that matter, can even reliably distinguish a vase from a human head. Researchers used to think that because our brains seem to be able to handle such tasks effortlessly, it wouldn’t be hard to get a machine to perform them. Chess–now that seemed hard. It goes to show you.
Besides, NASA might be willing to pay millions for a robot capable of wandering around the surface of Mars and grabbing soil samples, but how much are you going to pay to avoid taking out the trash? As always, researchers tend to go where the money is.
But not all robot scientists have given up on the idea of a robot for the rest of us. Kazuhiko Kawamura, a professor of electrical engineering at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, is determined to see robots take their place in the home and office. When I started working on this ten years ago, no one else seemed interested, he says. I had to arrange some very creative funding. Now Kawamura runs the Center for Intelligent Systems at Vanderbilt, and the money is trickling in to support the development of a small line of what Kawamura calls service robots– intelligent, autonomous robots that can perform useful jobs.
Kawamura’s current top-of-the-line robot is a dual-armed machine of vaguely humanoid styling, nicknamed, charmingly, Dual-Armed Humanoid. This robot has a sort of head, which consists of two swiveling video cameras mounted on a fixed platform. The robot can learn tasks by watching a human perform them and then mimicking the human’s actions. In this way, Dual-Armed Humanoid has learned, for example, to play the theremin, an electronic instrument from the 1920s that requires motions of the whole hand in the electric field between two electrodes rather than individual finger dexterity, of which the fingerless robot is in short supply.
To endow Dual-Armed Humanoid with the ability to grab small objects with its pincered arms–a surprisingly difficult task for most robots–Kawamura developed software that apes the strategy humans use to grab objects, at least when we’re infants. First a baby fixes the object in the center of his field of vision; then he sticks his hand out and notes where it is in his field of vision; then he moves his hand from the current location to the center of his field of vision, where the object awaits. Equipped with this fixation point strategy, Dual-Armed Humanoid can safely grab and handle silverware and can even spoon scalding soup from bowls.
Which is a good thing, because Dual-Armed Humanoid’s first intended application is feeding the sick, the handicapped, and the elderly in their homes. Since the robot is table-bound, Kawamura and his students developed a second, wheeled robot–HelpMate–with a single camera and arm that specializes in running through rooms to fetch items for Dual-Armed Humanoid. Thus HelpMate pops into the kitchen to grab a carton of orange juice and hands it to Dual-Armed Humanoid, which opens the carton, fills a glass, and holds it up to its master’s lips.
Why not build one robot that combines the capabilities of both? It’s too expensive says Kawamura. It’s much easier to build robots that specialize in certain tasks, and then get them to cooperate. We think in terms of robot networks, where the intelligence is distributed among two or more robots. As a bonus, Kawamura points out, a dual-robot system doesn’t necessarily become useless should one robot fail, as virtually all today’s robots do with impressive regularity. The second robot would be able to perform tasks on its own, such as picking up a phone and calling for help.
Kawamura’s group is also working on robots that can perform relatively complicated manufacturing assembly tasks, as well as a camera- equipped inchworm robot that can crawl along a ceiling on suction cups or magnets for police surveillance or for sneaking up on terrorists. But the big project on the drawing board is a more advanced version of the home- robot duo that will be capable of performing honest-to-goodness housekeeping chores, including cleaning up and taking out the trash. A sort of Team Rosie.
Kawamura says tests of Dual-Armed Humanoid with elderly and handicapped volunteers have been mostly successful, even though the robot tends to make a mess. One woman, however, complained that unlike her human helper, the robot couldn’t keep up its end of the conversation. I’ve thought about getting the group to teach the robots to crack jokes, says Kawamura with no hint of irony. But robotics graduate students aren’t very good at that sort of thing. Perhaps it’s just as well; after all, the Jetsons’ Rosie mostly used her dry wit to grouse. Besides, Dual-Armed Humanoid isn’t entirely without entertainment value, says Kawamura. It could play the theremin after dinner.
Mutable Feast
While we know that the Jetsons’ Food-a-Rac-a-Cycle instantly produced reasonably yummy-looking meals at the touch of a few buttons, the cartoon failed to specify the workings of this machine or the exact nature of its product. So we’re going to have to make some assumptions here. For one thing, the machine cannot have been materializing food out of thin air- -there has to be some limit even to what people of the future can do. It also could not have had access to thousands of ordinary ingredients, which it mixed and cooked in its microwave-oven-size chamber in less than a second. So we have no choice but to conclude that it must have been measuring out blobs of tasteless but nutritious paste, squirting in chemicals that approximated the flavor and color of the selected food, squeezing the paste into the appropriate shape and texture, and then flash- heating it to get the paste to set.
By coincidence, this is almost how food engineers produce many of today’s finest food analogues. If you didn’t know that food was engineered into stuff called analogues, that’s fair enough. But you can’t say you’ve never eaten any, unless you’re one of the few people fortunate enough to have managed to avoid artificially flavored fruit snacks, egg substitutes, veggie burgers, and hamburger extenders.
If anyone knows how to build a machine that could instantly whip up a passable analogue of virtually any food, it’s Susan Brewer. She is a food scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and for the past 17 years she and her colleagues have been searching for ever more efficient ways of turning bland paste into ever more convincing ersatz versions of an ever more varied selection of foods. There are ways to imitate almost everything, she boasts.
Dozens of foods–corn, whey, fish, wheat, peanuts, algae, and mushrooms–can easily be turned into bland goo, the basis of any analogue. But in the end, says Brewer, you’re probably going to go with the soybean. It’s cheap to grow, high in protein, and less likely than most of the other contenders to trigger life-threatening allergic reactions. What little flavor it has resides in the bean’s oil, so removing the oil and mixing the remainder with water yields a puddinglike slurry that’s about 95 percent protein–a gustatory tabula rasa. A lot of the bad associations people have with soy come from the late sixties, she says, when school lunch programs used a nasty version of soy that still had most of the oil in it.
Flavors are much trickier–some, such as coffee, result from the combination of as many as 600 different chemicals. In theory, of course, reproducing that flavor is simply a matter of throwing together the same chemicals. In practice it’s not that simple. For one thing, the components have to be in the right proportions, or the taste can be way off. Most of these chemicals taste bad separately, explains Brewer. It’s only when they’re combined in the right way that they add up to a nice flavor. To make things more complicated, we don’t really taste flavors other than sweet, salty, bitter, and sour; we mostly smell them, as molecules evaporate from the food in our mouths and travel up our back nasal passages to the top of our noses. So not only do you have to put together exactly the right chemicals in the right proportions, but you have to make sure they evaporate at the same time, and at the appropriate temperatures. That’s why serving temperature is so important to how foods taste. It’s also why food engineers often prefer to analyze the air around a chunk of food that’s been heated to serving temperature rather than a piece of the food itself.
Reproducing a flavor involves a lot of trial and error. The results tend to be better for fruit flavors, which are usually composed of lighter molecules that are easier to analyze and that evaporate evenly at lower temperatures. Meat flavor molecules, on the other hand, are heavier and difficult to identify in the lab, and they begin to evaporate readily only at temperatures above 120 degrees, which is just about as hot as the human mouth can tolerate. As an additional complication, almost all the flavor in meat resides in the fat, which people usually want removed for health reasons. And besides, fat molecules don’t mix well with the water contained in soy mixtures. So as a rough rule of thumb, a frozen artificial-strawberry-flavored soy-milk bar is likely to taste more authentic than a hot artificial-beef-flavored soy slab. But still, in theory, given the proper ingredients and proportions, a food synthesizer can squirt any flavor into the waiting soy paste.
All that’s left is giving the paste form. One method is to extrude it–to inject the paste between two long, threaded, revolving screws whose threads become more closely spaced as they spiral toward the far end. As the paste makes its way down the screws, it is mixed and squeezed more and more tightly, which causes it to heat up. By the time the paste emerges at the other end, it has already been cooked. Then it is forced–extruded–through nozzles. Adjusting the shape and size of the nozzles allows you to give the paste a bewildering variety of forms, ranging from the soft, stringy texture of shellfish to the firmer, grainy consistency of hamburger to the gooey, globular texture of pudding. You can do almost anything with an extruder, says Brewer.
As appetizing as flavoring and extrusion sound, many food analogues still need a bit of touching up before they’re ready for the table. Food engineers have worked some miracles with various chemical coatings, which provide that needed hint of stickiness or slipperiness. The artificial blueberry is one such triumph. The flavored, colored paste (usually made from algae rather than soy to get a more gelatinous consistency) is extruded into little globs and then dropped into a container of cold water mixed with calcium. The calcium molecules react with the algae to form a firm, fishnet molecular structure; once the structure starts to form on the outside of a glob, however, the fishnet blocks any additional calcium from getting inside. The result is a firm artificial skin around a moist jelly core.
Fresh vegetables, on the other hand, are problematic. They get their distinct crunchy-yet-moist texture from the microscopic cellulose- coated tubelike cells of which they’re composed. We’ve tried extruding tiny little spheres to imitate it, says Brewer, but it just ends up tasting as if you’re eating tiny little beady things. Artificial baked goods have also been a disappointment; no one has figured out how to get soy and most other bases to mimic wheat’s ability to cook into moist, puffy structures.
Over time, however, such holdouts are likely to succumb to relentless experimentation. Which means that the universal food synthesizer could possibly be more than just a dream. So how about it? 
Yes, it’s possible, Brewer concedes, but I doubt anyone would bother to build one. Why would anyone pay goodness-knows-how-many thousands of dollars for a machine that would produce (at best) slightly weird versions of things they can buy for pocket change at the corner store? Even if you wanted to avoid meat for religious or health reasons, or to bypass foods to which you’re allergic, you don’t need anything as elaborate as a universal food synthesizer. And besides, real food is probably healthier anyway. Many people tend to think of analogues as being better for you because they may have less fat, says Brewer. But a lot of analogues do have fat, and some replace fat with sugar.
In other words, even if someone invented and marketed a universal food synthesizer tomorrow, it would probably end up in the back of thousands of closets next to the bread-making and cappuccino machines.
Still, it’s good to know the technology is feasible, should fresh food become unavailable. You know, if a postnuclear global plague contaminated the soil, for example, or if marauding aliens kept us captive in high orbit around one of the outer planets.
Conclusion
Zipping airborne to the mall in a winged Hyundai, having your drapes vacuumed by a trash can on wheels, summoning up an instant three-course meal with a push of a button–what’s not to like about such a future? Especially if you can have these things without marauding aliens or post-nuclear global plagues. I mean, we’re talking awesome technology without a downside…right???
