Where’s My Awesome Tomorrow?

I read an article yesterday. A depressing, saddening article. It wasn’t about how global warming is ravaging our planet. Nothing about an increase in crime or poverty. It didn’t touch on genetically modified food or the obesity epidemic. Nope, it was simple. It focused on how Google Glass is looking like a big old failure. Just look at the title: “Google Glass is Ready to Become This Era’s Segway.”

How awful is that?

The only way things could get any worse is if I suddenly were to find out that self-driving cars aren’t going to come to production, after all.

I remember when I first read about Segway, and when I first saw Google Glass. They were exciting technologies. Things I thought would change the way we lived. Things that would bring us closer to what I think we all can agree is our ultimate goal:

Living like the Jetsons.

Seriously. I’ve been lied to, people. I want my flying car and my robot maid! Is it too much to ask from science? I mean, I’m willing to wait on the house that is way up in the sky. I don’t even need need a talking dog. (Not that I’d turn one down, mind you.)

But then I look at Segways and Google Glass, and I begin to wonder if this isn’t the fault of science at all. If maybe–just maybe–humanity itself is to blame. Science gives us awesome, innovative things, and we turn them into jokes on Arrested Development.

At least it’s for a funny show. If it were all done for something like Two and a Half Men, I’d be even more depressed.

I get that Segway can come across as something for the lazy, and that Google Glass has more than a little bit of creepy to it. But come on! It’s up to us to figure out how to put the awesome to work, not to make fun of the cool things people are coming up with.

And yet we ignore it. Let innovation die. And every time we let a Google Glass slip into becoming the butt of jokes, our robot maid gets a little farther away.

I realize I’m part of the problem. I’ve never been on a Segway, and I never considered actually buying Google Glass. (They both cost way too much money.) But the next time science comes out with something awesome, how about we all decide not to make fun of it?

Or are you people not interested in robot maids?