Progress seldom lives up to expectations

I'd like to know what happened to the jet pack.
At the start of the movie "Thunderball," James Bond strapped one on his back and propelled skyward like Superman to escape a bad guy's chateau.
When I saw that scene in 1965 at age 12, I figured it was a lock that in 10 years or so we'd all be using those to sail to McDonald's for a large fries.
It hasn't happened.
Five years ago, people said the same thing about that motorized scooter called the Segway. It was going to instantly change the world, replacing polluting cars for short trips and even replacing our legs. We would never have to walk again.
That hasn't happened, either. Nor have suburbs on the moon.
Progress, sadly, seldom lives up to expectations.
I bring this up because the National Academy of Engineering is about to predict the great technology breakthroughs we should expect this century. Not long ago, they listed the top 20 of the last 100 years, including electricity, the automobile, the airplane and clean water.
Personally, I think that's a slight to the Pez dispenser, as well as that decoder ring you used to get in the bottom of cereal boxes. I also like the seek button on car radios, automatic ice-makers, the TV remote, lettuce-in-a-bag, cup-holders on movie seats, caller-ID, Splash Mountain and curbside check-in.
But that's so last century. The question now is what will be big between now and 2100.
The academy has asked folks to go to www.engineeringchallenges.org with suggestions. So far, they're not sharing any. So I thought I'd give some of my own.
I'm thinking this will finally be the century they get the flying cars going. For decades, it seems most movies about the future have featured flying cars, like in "Minority Report" with Tom Cruise where they blasted along vertical and horizontal highways.
Skeptics out there may wonder what would actually power flying cars. Most films explain it in two words: mag and lev. Trust me, in this century, mag-lev will be big.
Robots
There's one other big item most science fiction movies predict: robots. Even before "Thunderball" there was "The Day the Earth Stood Still" featuring a patriarchal robot named Gort. He was scary, but only when humans misbehaved, and besides, you could usually calm him down by saying, "Klaatu barada nikto." Every little kid from the 1950s remembers that line. You never know when you might need it.
I figured the world would be crawling with Gorts by now. Or at least household versions of Gort, like the slender fellows featured in "iRobot" who kept house for you. But the closest we've come to any of this is a pizza-sized robot called Roomba which allegedly vacuums your floor by itself. I haven't gotten one yet, in part because I worry that Roombas will get "smart" like the machines in "Terminator" or the droids in "iRobot" and take over the world. Still, I'm guessing robots will be big by 2100.
"Minority Report" had one other idea I liked. Folks of the future were reading newspapers, just like today, only the stories constantly updated right on the paper. This technology would also help magazines like Sports Illustrated, which arrived in my mail the day after the Super Bowl full of stories speculating on which team might win. I would recommend a Manhattan Project-like effort by the government to invent updating-paper before some blogger in Dubuque with a high-speed connection puts me out of a job. I'm surprised, too, they haven't come up with a hover-board by now. That was the levitating skateboard used by Michael Fox in "Back to the Future." Actually, once I took my daughter to see The Backstreet Boys in Boston and they all glided down from the ceiling on hover-boards. But I'm guessing there were guy-wires attached.
I am also hoping this century sees a medical tricorder like the one in "Star Trek." That's what Dr. Bones McCoy used to diagnose everything with by simply waving it over a patient. I think he once did this and declared in surprise, "He has no brain." I'm not sure that was realistic since I know many people with that syndrome and you don't need a device to tell it. But at the least the tricorder would make obsolete those rubber gloves used by doctors during yearly exams for males over 40, and if you ask me, that alone would be more significant than electricity, the automobile, the airplane and clean water combined.
Enough speculation. I did some research on which exotic technologies are realistically in the near-future pipeline.
I came up with self-cooling beer cans.
Transparent toasters so you can see when the bread is burning.
And an intelligent spoon that will tell you if the recipe you're stirring has too little salt.
That's about it.
I think I'll go and rent "Thunderball."
Patinkin writes for The Providence Journal. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.