The Westinghouse Total Electric Home (1960) [video]

Those super powerful microwaves were real. You just need them to be huge and expensive. Turns out 6 seconds vs. 6 minutes doesn’t matter much compared to the unit being the size of a fridge vs. a toaster.

On a close listen, you find out that the "electric outdoor barbecue" is electric by dint of electric starter and electric motorized rotisserie. Sounds like even the "electric barbecue" runs on charcoal or gas.

Another problem with electric grills/BBQs from my experience is that they’re just not powerful enough - even the smallest breeze is enough to blow away the little heat created by the heating element and the food takes ages to cook as a result if outdoors. I’m sure it’ll perform better indoors but then you have to deal with the fumes.

In 50 years human-size labor robots will be common in households that are middle class and above. They'll recharge locally, and won't be meant to travel great distances while powered on, so their battery packs won't need to be massive. They'll be capable of performing a decent variety of mundane household labor, including laundry, dishes, mowing the lawn, picking up / organizing rooms of the house, mopping floors, cleaning the bathroom. We'll organize these spaces to an extent for their benefit, to better comply with how they do what they do. Appliances will be marketed for use by humans only, or mixed use (either robot or human can operate).

As a consequence of these robots humans will increasingly forget how to pick up after themselves (as a routine) and or never learn it in the first place as children.

What, you don't have a refrigerator? What, you don't have a washing machine? What, you don't have a television? What, you don't have a dish washer? What, you don't have a microwave? What, you don't have an Alice bot? And so on it goes.

Work spaces will have similar robots to pick up after employees and perform other assisting tasks in the office. Silicon Valley or its equivalent will get these robots first as a new perk that will be lampooned initially (the nerds that can't even take care of themselves) and then it'll spread across corporate America because of the productivity benefits and convenience aspect.

The same bots will displace very large amounts of labor in retail outlets like Walmart, Target, Walgreens, CVS, Costco; and fastfood chains.

It's not a question of if this is going to happen. It's a question of whether it takes closer to 25 years or closer to 50 years (I'd bet on 35-50 years) to hit an inflection point where the robot avalanche gains significant momentum. These won't be hyper competent everything robots, like you see portrayed in eg I, Robot (the Will Smith movie), they'll be quite specialized and quite limited compared to science fiction, but still very useful.

In the style that the smartphone ate one thing after another, the humanoid robot assistant will eat one labor task after another, and that's how they'll be advertised initially. Robot v1 does X; Robot v2 now does X, Y; Robot v3 now does X, Y, Z. It'll be a productivity arms race in the early days, and then the improvements will rapidly slow down and the robots will become a fashion competition or something else, as they saturate the easy wins in labor elimination.

In 50 years, I see gated communities of wealthy people being guarded by fixed mounted automatic AI controlled machine guns, or high powered lasers.

We won't have hugh areas of homlessness because the powers at be will be actively using that Broken the Window Pane theory to harass people to the point they commit suicide.

Technology will advance, but only the wealthy will be able to afford it.

The wealthy capitalists will rely more heavily on Globalism to peddle their wares.

I don't even foresee a chit show like current India. Meaning the wealthy live in ivory towers butted up to absolute slums.

The American wealthy will not stand for that. They don't want to see the squalor.

(In all seriousness, I'm concerned about how America is going to treat the huge spike in homelessness post Covid. I don't like what I'm seeing now. Meaning the powers at be are just harassing the homeless until they move along. I'm embarrassed the way my town of Sausalito made a minor problem of homelessness (Anchorouts whom have been there for over a century), and made the current recipients of a ham handed approach to rid Richardson bay of anyone who is poor much worse. Yes--that last sentance is grammatically terrible, but I'm just to tired to fix it.)

Many of the ideas in this are better than what we ended up with. I don't see anybody logging into online accounts to use their accoutrements.

This video makes me want to cry.

I have the bad feeling that in 2070 its more about barbecuing rats on a stick over a fire in an old oil drum while having a shotgun on the ready if the canibals show up...