Most smart-phone savvy consumers were unimpressed with Apple's latest iPhone - the iPhone 5. Let's be honest, we all expected something a bit more creative, especially since Samsung are quickly catching up in terms of popularity and inventiveness. Some might say everybody needs to shut up and remember we were all playing snake in black and white on a Nokia 3210 little more than 10 years ago, but while bearing that in mind remember that, very soon, we're going to need something really quite big to happen technologically if we're to be in the same shoes as Will Smith in i, Robot (hopefully minus all the death and destruction) come the year 2035.
In 2004's i, Robot (set in the year 2035 and out now in futuristic 3D on a special edition Blu-ray) Will Smith got butt-naked in the shower and fought off hordes of psychotic robots that were designed to help us around the house, with our shopping, opening jars, running baths and wiping our ass, for example. They all, however, turned nasty - and red - and decided that the best way to protect us was to protect us from ourselves. By killing all of us. These deadly robotic bastards were called the NS-5, released to the public and into people's homes by that bitch V.I.K.I and those sinister folks up at U.S. Robotics, but that's after a whole batch of old and out-dated robots were withdrawn. This then makes it look even less likely that we'll get robots that look quite as snazzy as the NS-5 in 23 years time. Hell, we're all gobsmacked by this little devil - we've clearly got a long way to go! But, here's a shot at the maths...
Let's imagine that the robots we will have in the future are going to be released the same amount of years apart as the different iPhone models. Let's assume there were four robots before the NS-5 came around. There have been six different iPhones, released a year apart from one another. So, working with that time frame, the first robot in i, Robot was revealed to a presumably amazed general public in the year 2030. There would have been around a year or two's worth of speculation over the idea and design - which means we can expect to hear about fully functional robots as clever and as animated as Sonny hitting the shelves by 2028 - 16 years from now. That's three years longer than it took us to get from the Nokia 3210 to the iPhone 5.
It may boggle the mind, but if you think about it for long enough you begin to realise that it's probably quite possible. Take a look at the following video and you could be convinced we might even beat Dr. Alfred Lanning's 23 year deadline:
In the early 2000's we were wonderfully entertained by a robot that looked like a skeleton climbing a rope on the BBC's Olympic version of Robot Wars, 'Techno Games'. A tad more than ten years later and we've landed a cute little robot called 'Curiosity' on Mars - fucking Mars! - and he may well answer the human race's biggest question: "Is there life out there?"
This year's Prometheus landed on the distant moon LV-223 in 2089, with a little help from David - a convincingly fleshy and human-looking robot that's capable of mimicking and understanding human emotion as well as recognising the fact he has a mind of his own. He can question his own existence, the meaning of his own life and, as a result, he's more than a little bit frightening in a 'Lawrence of Arabia' sort of way. If Ridley Scott's dates are at all realistic, we can expect to see the following advert on our hi-def holographic televisions in 77 years...
For the moment we'll have to make do with face time and Temple Run, but give it a few decades and we'll more than likely be having our packed lunches put together by C-3PO. But, if the thought of waiting so long depresses you, perk yourself up by quickly masturbating over this photograph of butt-naked Will Smith in the shower... then rush out and give HMV some of your hard-earned cash to have an oggle at it in 3D!
Feeling better already! Rumour has it that digitally removing Will Smith's massive penis from this scene was the most expensive piece of CGI in the entire movie. Or something. Maybe not.
Roo