> you still have to raise your child irl.
with the fact that increasingly I see children being strolled around with tablets mounted in front of their faces, by parents with phones in front of their faces. Imagine these strollers were self-guided, say, they were monitored and could tram children around the park while they played on their pacifying devices! I feel we aren't too far off. DJI could certainly make quite a nice stroller, I would imagine.
I recently had a baby, and we had to fend off MANY attempts to gift us battery (or plug) powered baby seats -- and still we ended up with a mamaRoo[0] in our closet because my mother wouldn't take "no" for an answer. This is a device where you can strap your newborn in (!) and the chair will rock her for you, play gentle music either via the onboard memory or via Bluetooth, to soothe or quiet your baby for you. Behold the truly dystopian image on their product page[1]. Our thinking was that we wanted to keep responsibility of this task for ourselves, along with the stress, thank-you-very-much, because we wanted to experience it and we wanted our baby to experience it -- physically. But still! There are emporiums, I came to learn, full of these types of gadgets that are designed to offload the burden of parenting.
With the sheer momentum of technology and the absolute hijacking of our attention spans, I can all-too-vividly imagine a world not far from now where raising your child can happen almost entirely by "remote". I fear this, of course, but I can imagine it.
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0. https://www.4moms.com/mamaroo
1. https://www.4moms.com/assets/mamaroo/ultimate_seat-602c8d008...
But device time is robbing our children of the trials and frustrations and educational opportunities provided by the dirty, analog, political, unfair, painful and tangible-risk REAL world.
When I was growing up there was a declared difference between those with an academic education and a "street" education. Now it seems the difference is between the virtual social landscape and reality.
they're actually ok for when you need 20 minutes to cook dinner or do some other small task.
That's a swing. A fancy swing, but a swing nonetheless. We've had those for decades and before electricity cradles existed for probably as long as we had furniture.