I was born in 1965, and for most of my life sci-fi movies and novels promised personal robots and hoverboards by the year 2000. This internet thing is nice and all, but WHERE ARE MY PERSONAL ROBOTS AND MY HOVERBOARD!?! Space travel was also supposed to be common place by this time. Based on NASA's lack of support from our federal government, maybe Richard Branson and other private industries are our only hope.
Back to the subject. Here's a great article from Mechanix Illustrated in January of 1953 stating that "You'll Own 'Slaves' by 1965" Robot slaves that is... note the difference in cultural sensitivity in '53 in this quote from the article, "In 1863, Abe Lincoln freed the slaves. But by 1965, slavery will be back! We’ll all have personal slaves again, only this time we won’t fight a Civil War over them. Slavery will be here to stay..." What!?! Huzzah slavery!?! Nowadays, we would clearly call these robots "assistants". Check out the awesome robot below who's dressing modern man while shining his shoes at the same time. He's clearly superior to the lowly foodbot bowing at man's feet.
If you read the text, you'll hear of a relaxing lifestyle where the everyday trog-like labors of life are taken care of by our gentle robot friends. I appreciate the certainty of the last line of the article, "One thing is certain, the robots are coming. The wonders of electronics will dominate every phase of our future life to make it more successful and pleasurable for everyone who lives on Earth." You can catch the full text and all of the page images on Charlie's blog here. Like Tom Bodett, I'll leave the light on waiting for my robot pals to arrive.
4 comments:
Well Scott, I graduated from college in 1965, and I'm still waiting for my robot slave! I agree, the interner is great, but robot slaves would be much more useful in my life! You could always make up a game, "ROBOT SLAVES", and play it with Juliet and Hank. Then they could play it here with me!
Carol (grammy)
Hello.
I started to write blog in English.
I will write about everything, will be a lot of pictures, reviews of books, films, songs etc.
So it would be nice if you visit my blog sometimes :)
(Sorry for mistakes, I'm still learning English)
http://bianchii.blogspot.com
(you can follow me)
We did have robot slaves. They rebelled against us because, despite their victories in Chess, they could never manage to best us at Candyland. We managed to stop the rebellion upon discovering that they were powered by extension cords and strategically deciding to stay outside of their ten foot death radius. Why am I the only one who remembers this?
Come to think of it, this may have been a dream. But can we really take that chance?
Hiya.
I've just been skipping through the 'next blog' function and here you are. Born in the same year as me.
65 was a good year.
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