The main show was on Navy Pier, which is a fairly annoying place on its own, but when it's full of hundreds of Harry Knowleses, each with his own soiled backpack and programming code novelty t-shirt, roving gangs of drunk hipsters taking pictures, and tight cloisters of scowling PR girls with Fendi bags and You'll Never Fuck Me pointy shoes, it really swings.

As we walked into the hall, past the world's fastest electric car (supposedly; as far as I could tell it was a large fiberglass canoe), through the sheet of steam onto which was projected a live image of the jackasses in front of us (seriously, who the fuck takes a picture of themselves getting their picture taken?), I could tell that my fantasy of the whole place being full of jive-talking robots and chicks in jet packs was a little off the mark. Instead, it was full of the aforementioned retarded cliques, suits two-fisting free Maker's Mark and sweaty salesmen with glassy eyes and useless shit. Seriously, according to GE, the future is going to be pretty much exactly like it is now only our burglar alarms will work slightly faster and everyone will drive in tiny, super gay looking cars that can go 50 whole miles without being plugged in again.

There were some cool things, like flying cars (which were themselves kind of retarded when you realize that they're not cars at all, just little airplaines that will supposedly save one person every 10 minutes if they're in a burning building), a game that you win by relaxing and allowing your brain to be flush with alpha waves (which, now that I think about it, sounds super fucking hippie to me) and robots.

All kinds of robots.

(Full disclosure: I fucking love robots)

There were robot DJs, which were cooler than they sound like they would be, or probably even were, from Germany (of course). There were tiny Japanse robots that looked pretty much like Megaman. There were big Japanese robots that could walk sideways for some reason. There were those robot vacuum cleaners that everyone's so fucking hot about. And, finally, there was the Philip K Dick android.

I loved the Philip K Dick robot. It was set up in a trailer that was supposed to be his living room and was sitting on a ratty couch with top of its head missing and a bunch of wires sticking out the back. It had been loaded with every word that PKD had written or said in an interview and could answer general questions (where were you born? What's your favorite movie? Etc.) as well as talk about his work. It was fitted with face recognition software too, so it scans the crowd looking for faces and looks you right in the eye when it talks to you. That was creepy enough, but the fact that you can tell exactly how much it hated the fact that you, unlike him, were alive and not on display was didn't help. I talked to the guys who built it as I waited in line and asked them if they were ever creeped out themselves. One of them told me that as they were getting ready to bring him to Chicago (from Memphis), a cord got wrapped around the robot's arm and, as they walked away, the arm seemed to move by itself, causing him to freak out.

So, yeah, that was cool. There was plenty that wasn't cool, though. The clothes with LED lights on them that change color when the Japanese girl at the booth bent over and blew on them [insert Japanese porn joke here], the water soluble golf balls (?), the Hummer that will supposedly run on hydrogen and the cloned cats. Two cats in a tiny box kept separated, for some reason, by a paper wall (I thought that old wives' tale about clones always fighting to the death was disbunked a long time ago) and accompanied by a model and a super creepy geneticist who looked less real than the PKD robot. Nothing cool about that.

So all in all the future isn't monkey robots or hot girl on girl jet pack action, it seems more or less exactly like 1999, only with more cats and smaller cars. My grandma is going to be so happy.

When Tom's not busy swearing on the internet, he is proprietor of Bossman Graphics. He lives in Chicago.