Strange Inventions

Today’s society has given us many amazing and useful products that can help us live our lives to the fullest extent. Things such as television, cars, walk in bathtubs and air-conditioning all greatly improve our enjoyment of the lives we lead. Along with the convenience of something like a walk in bathtub, however, there have been some increasingly strange inventions, the use of which is growing more and more difficult to understand. Let us take a look at a few of these strange creations, and wonder about why they have been made.

One particular creation of the last ten years has been the fridge with a television on it. These were highly expensive, sleekly designed and targeted, clearly, at those with a large amount of expendable income. It has to be wondered, what would the use of such a device be? While it would be amusing at first, and perhaps entering the fridge for more food would mean precious moments of a football game were not missed, but the long-lasting appeal of a television-fridge could not be anything major. It would be hard to fathom the idea of watching an entire film on this television that is for sure.

The television fridge, while certainly bizarre, points to a trend in new products: The combination of separately created technology into one item. Take the latest range of XBox and Playstation video game systems. Along with being simple video game devices, these machines also give many of the functions provided with computers. The use of a hard drive, the ability to view image, along with the usual games show an increasing synchronization of different technologies.

The same is true in reverse, as computers have become more developed they have taken on the attributes of other systems. It is now not seen as anything special that a computer can be used in the same way as a television, with shows promptly downloaded at the whim of the user, or that monitor sizes are now big enough to make watching films an immersive experience. It would be hard to imagine a person from thirty years ago envisioning such inventions coming about today.

This increasing combination of machines leads one to the ultimate conclusion that someday, only a single product will exist. Would it not be a strange time to live in? It is really not much of a stretch to consider a laptop combined with a phone, than perhaps combined with a television, video game system and maybe even a refrigerator!

While these inventions are fun to think about, one has to consider the realities of such an item. How would the creation of such a product affect our lives? Would all stores simply sell different add-ons to the same products? Would our lives become significantly less interesting if we were all simply plugged into the one machine? The idea of being taken over by evil machines is a laughable one, but perhaps the idea that we would willingly let machines take over our lives for us while we play video games is one that might just be possible.

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