The future, as it turns out, is a lot like the present but with slightly better robots. If the crowd gathered at the Javits Center this weekend for Wired Magazine's "NextFest" futurist convention was any indication, the future is also much, much nerdier.
As if to say "get ready for boredom," NextFest planners placed a "kitchen of the future" exhibit at the front of the hall. I learned that kitchens in the future will clean themselves and food of the future will cook itself. If this kept up though, an interesting newspaper column about NextFest would not write itself.
Thankfully, things improved dramatically from there. I read something about waltzing robots in promotional material and was excited when we stumbled upon the giant pink and blue machines. Yes, they were gigantic; yes, they were covered in wires and buttons and yes, they were technically machines, but I quickly decided that they would still have made better dates than the ones I managed to get for most of my high school dances.
We waited patiently for the bots to begin dancing, before the guy running the booth told us that they needed two hours to "recharge their batteries" before they could dance, which was funny because my high school dates had used the same excuse.
In the northeast corner of the building, high school teams were battling each other with robots they had constructed over the year as part of the FIRST Robot Competition. This is where the true nerds gathered. According to the brochures I picked up, the FIRST Robot Competition was designed to give high school students some much needed exposure to robot building, by giving any interested high school team $5,000 with which to build a basketball-playing robot. The teams then faced off in robot basketball, a game that had a lot in common with the WNBA.
Five thousand dollars sounds like a lot of money, but apparently in the world of robot building, it doesn't stretch very far. One team's robot consisted of an engine with wheels and a cardboard box on top. Team members threw balls into the box which then launched them in the general direction of the basket. The group that put this monstrosity together called themselves "Team Cardboard" and in five minutes failed to score a single basket. In an interview after the match, the team captain expressed plans to attend Harvard.
The award for the most pointless product of the convention goes to a Japanese inventor, whose visual turntable could play drawings as music. It was a great idea, but the music that emerged from the machine was an unlistenable cacophony of squeaks and yelps that sounded like a music project in which Yoko Ono had been heavily involved.
Great ideas that didn't quite work were common around NextFest. At one booth, a biotech company had tried to create a bionic arm attachment that would help humans to lift heavy objects. I tried it on and then attempted to lift a relatively light 10 pound barbell.
"Try to imagine yourself lifting the weight," and I did, but the barbell sat there motionless, until I finally gave up. Strangely, the midget who was behind me in line had no problem with the device.
The most popular product at the convention was a kung fu video game, where your real life karate chops and kicks controlled the actions of your character. My brother and I got in the rather long line to play and prepared a hilarious routine that we were convinced would have the large crowd in hysterics. We would begin our fight with a respectful bow and then strike appropriate Matrix poses. In our karate moves, "Street Fighter" imagery would abound.
The plan seemed like a great idea until the guy right before us in line began to play and was an actual black belt. He performed cartwheels, roundhouse kicks and set a new high score for the day. When he was finally knocked out, the previously silent crowd erupted into applause.
After this, the routine that my brother and I had quickly put together did not seem as impressive, and we were quickly and quietly dispatched by a kung fu character with the head of George W. Bush.
In trying to predict the future, NextFest organizers have taken on a thankless task, because after "Running Man," American's expectations are already impossibly high. Still, the convention provided me with a decent look at the future. Tom Knight is an economics major from San Juan Capistrano, Calif. He can be reached at ttknight@princeton.edu.
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