GUEST COLUMNIST: I've seen the future, and it's kind of boring

This is the year 2000? This is the "future" everyone's been waiting for? What happened to The Jetsons? Where's the real 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Where are the flying cars? Where are the personal robots? Where are the moving sidewalks? Where are the breakfast pills?

What do we have in the year 2000? The "Boogie Bass."

I can buy books through my cell phone and my PalmPilot Pro is several orders of magnitude faster than the machine that once filled a room in the basement of the Moore School. Actually, my watch is probably also unmeasurably faster than ENIAC was.

But I can't really talk to my computer and expect an intelligent answer, like in Star Trek or 2001. My cell phone has very little personality. My PC has almost none. Hardly HAL 9000 quality.

Where's Rosie the robot maid? Do you even see robots any more? When I was eight, Radio Shack used to stock dozens of remote control toy robots. Sure, they were glorified radio-controlled cars, but they were fun anyway.

Flying cars. Why don't we have flying cars? A book I found from 1989 promised flying cars for specialized tasks. I don't see them.

We don't even really have electric cars yet. I mean, come on, the internal-combustion engine is so early 20th century. We can do better than this.

We don't have futuristic food yet, either. What happened to freeze-dried, just-add-water dining? Meals in a pill. Food synthesizers? The microwave's been around since the 60's -- it's getting old.

What happened to space travel. We go to th moon once,m pick up some rocks, and that's it? Come on, send some people back there. It would be so much more sense than these Mars probes that keep disappearing.

What happened to all the really exciting innovations? Sure, being able to buy Cheetos without having to step outside is nice, but hardly thrilling.

For all the talk about the rapid pace of technology, we haven't caught to midcentury science fiction in terms of pure "gee-whiz" excitement.

When you get down to it, really, Amazon.com is about as fascinating as Spacely Sprockets.

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