Catching Up With the Joneses*

I still remember the day we got our first color television. 

It wasn't all that long ago --okay, it was 44 years ago, so sue me-- but it was also long after most of my peers had a color television in their house.

We'd always had a television as long as I could remember, but they'd all been black and white. Given the lack of money my parents had, I understand the economics of the situation --black and white TVs were much cheaper than color televisions-- and I suspect my parents got a hand-me-down TV or two over the years. The television circuitry were vacuum tube based**, and looking back on it I wonder just what my parents were thinking when they left said TVs on rickety carts that looked like were going to collapse at any time. 

It looked a bit like this, although this TV cart
is a lot sturdier than ours was. From AtariAge.

I'm not sure when Mom and Dad decided to finally buy a color television set, but the day they did it was memorable for me because it was the day that the episode of The Incredible Hulk called Prometheus Part I aired. I remember that because when Dad was setting up the television that was the show he was using to check the color settings, and it's not every day that David Banner is there next to a big ol' meteor.

From hulk.fandom.wiki.

It feels very odd now, looking back at television sets from back then, and comparing it to the sort of television that we have in our houses now:

No, it's not our house. Do you know how hard
it is to find a "generic" looking house with a modern
television inside? So many of them look like
homes for people much wealthier than myself.
From Tom's Guide review for the Sony Bravia 3.

It's been 45 years for me from that first color television set to today, and it feels like I'm looking at a Sopwith Camel versus a Lockheed-Martin F-22. There are times when I wonder just what the next 45 years will bring, but I also wonder what will happen to us in the next 45 years. Okay, I'll likely have kicked the bucket, but I meant we as a species. If people tell you they know what will result from our impending singularity, they're likely incorrect. I don't think anybody really knows what will happen, and pretending they do is like putting lipstick on a pig. People may tell you what they want to happen, for good or ill, but that ain't worth crap. There's already speculation about what our current level of generative AI is (or isn't), but it isn't what I'd consider AI to be. It's just a better form of search with the "side benefit" of AI lying to us. 

Oh, I'm sorry, it's "hallucinating", which is a fancy way of saying you're making shit up because it might be what we want. So in that respect, generative AI is as good as the average politician. But let's hope that generative AI is at least as useful as that old color television set, whose analog reception was relevant up until 2009.

*Ironically enough, we did have a neighbor in our old neighborhood --prior to our move in 1976 to my parents' current home-- with a last name of Jones. Sometimes you can't make this stuff up.

**When I was little, I used to warm my hands on cold days in winter by putting them over the vents in the back of the set by bringing a chair over and standing on top of it to reach the back of the TV. If you've ever been in the vicinity of a vacuum tube radio or television, you know that they get pretty warm over time. 

#Blaugust2025