One of the formative experiences of my childhood was the New York World's Fair of 1962-63, where America's great and beneficent corporations introduced consumers to the future. The memory that sticks with me most is of Bell Telephone's "picture phone," which we were told would be widely in use by the mid-1980s.

I'm still waiting, even if I know I'd never buy one. The technology for picture phones has been available for years, and there are even models on the market. But just because the hardware exists doesn't mean consumers want it. I won't attempt to go into the specific reasons why people don't want to see, and be seen by, their interlocutor when they're talking on the phone, but, obviously, they don't. Otherwise, picture phones would be the norm.

Robots were also a big thing at the fair, but unlike picture phones there were no demonstration models, just graphics and animation. The message was that robots, like all good consumer electronics, would make our lives easier.