It’s been over 50 years now since George Jetson and his Orbit City lifestyle debuted as the first program broadcast in color on ABC-TV.  George lived in the Skypad Apartments with his wife Jane and their two children, Judy and Elroy.  His work week consisted of an hour a day, two days a week, where he turned the Referential Universal Digital Indexer on and off for the Spacely Sprocket Company.  The Jetson’s cushy lifestyle was enabled by numerous labor-saving devices which sometimes broke down, cueing the laugh track.  Much of the show’s humor was derived from the family’s complaints about the inconveniences of those tasks that weren’t yet automated. 

In retrospect, The Jetsons is notable not for the technological advances that it foresaw, but for the ideal it created of the perfect future where we wouldn’t have to do much of anything except push buttons.  These days, buttons are a big part of our lives, and a great many entrepreneurial calories are burned in seeking the next breakthrough labor-saving gizmo.  Unlike the Jetsons audiences, today’s households rarely find things that don’t work to be a source of merriment.

There is a busy intersection about a half mile from our house that my wife and I frequently cross when out for a walk.  Each of the four corners has two of those crosswalk buttons, eight in total, and seven of them let out an audible chirp when touched (they are electronic only, with no mechanical action).  The one exception produces no sound.  Because the intersection is a complex one, with multiple left arrows and variable timing to accommodate changes in traffic, there is really no way to know if that one button really does anything.  This hasn’t stopped us from pushing it for the past 8 years. <continue>