The future is here, at the Delta Airlines terminal at La Guardia in NYC.
I've been to lots of airports lately, but this is way, way new: the restaurants, retail shops and gate waiting areas are filled with identical, individual kiosks equipped with Apple iPods and charging outlets.
I'm sitting with my wife at a table for two, having breakfast, peering at her over the tops of two iPads set in the middle of the table. I order my breakfast on the iPad, I pay for it with a swipe of a credit card, and when I touch the Internet feature on the iPad my flight comes up with information.
In other words, without much difficulty this iPad could regurgitate every fact of my life connected to my credit cards. So far, it can't read my mind.
All around me, couples are eating breakfast with iPads in between their gazes. It's disconcerting. It's real.
Since cell phones transformed my life, I've wandered airport departure areas looking for electrical outlets. Here at LGA, Delta has embraced a solution, using recharge outlets combined with iPads to provide a glimpse of the future: wired, aware, connected and assuming that our bottomless attraction to information will always trump our unfathomable natures.
Everyone is going somewhere. And if you have lost your way, all flight paths will get you there.
4 comments:
The future is scary and I wonder how we will adapt and cope with it. What will we do when electronic robbery in our bank accounts is normal, and we have no way to control our money? How will our economy change when we can order things on the Internet and a printer type device manufactures it immediately? We simply order the gun and the bullets, and in a few minutes, we have it in our hands?
Wow. I don't know if this is cool or not. Pretty soon our future will have no ability to actually speak to each other face to face.
Airports are going to be impacted by sequestration. No one is focusing on its impacts on Miami-Dade as a whole yet. But with the President and members of Congress taking pay cuts, it must be bad.
We have rushed too fast into the new technologies. With the cell phones, everyone is talking to someone. And when we are with them, we are reading. With the coming devices that manufacture things ordered, we will have to limit access to them. In terms of the banking system, we might need a new unconnected banking system that operates on cash, and that is not connected to the Internet.
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