Waiting for the Future

I can’t wait for my vacation this year. The missus and I will use our jet-packs to hop over to the airport, where our personal helicopter will whisk us to the space center, where we’ll board the Southwest shuttle (weightless peanuts!) to the Moon. (The Dark Side Hilton has an incredible fly/stay deal right now on travelpriceobitz.com.)

Oh, wait. No can do … even though these are all things that were to have been commonplace by now, according to predictions made 15 or 20 years ago.

Well, never mind. I’ll spend my vacation listening to my voice-activated Internet radio in my car, and my Internet TV all over the house.

Oh, wait. Those prognostications, made five or ten years ago, have yet to occur as well.

It seems that we’re always five years away, but it takes us 15-20 years to get there—assuming the idea was a good and practical one in the first place. (Jet packs? Personal choppers? Not so much.)

So, in the tradition of deferred predictive gratification, allow me to look ahead …

• Radio and television stations will abandon their over-the-air signals by 2050. All television will be received via cable or the Internet; radio, mostly the Internet.
  
• Satellite radio, seeing itself as a content provider rather than a delivery medium, will morph into another set of Internet-delivered, advertiser-supported channels, with no more chance of succeeding than you or I have.
  
• HD Radio, which has no content in and of itself, will become irrelevant.

If you’ve gone to the trouble and expense to install HD, don’t despair. When the vinyl (well, glass, originally) record was invented, nobody foresaw the CD. In fact, our modern age is probably the first in which we know beyond doubt that every advance will very soon become outmoded. (Have you bought a computer lately?) Most of the time, we even have a pretty good idea of what will outmode it.

So, HD operators—and indeed all of us, who are surrounded by technology with soon-to-expire freshness dates—be of good cheer: the future always takes longer to get here than we think it will.