Hey! Quick! Give me an idea!

I said I'd figure out to do something with this space, and darnit, I'm trying.

Today's idea comes from Viscous Platypus, "Robots! From the future! with hats."

It's hard to write about the future. Not knowing what comes next is only natural, of course, but here we are in 2007, and I still have no flying car. Sure, I could cop out and talk about how I could dig up my old Lego set tomorrow, build some robot, and put a hat on it. Or I could do it five minutes from now, so long as it's after I've finished this. Is the focus the robot, the future, or the hat?

Would've thought that by now they would've had more robots. Sure, there's the robotic assembly line. There's the discontinued robot pet. The proof of concept. The fiction. The fiction. The fiction. Ok, maybe not that last one.

But let's talk about the fiction. The believable fiction. The sort that we might see. In "The Diamond Age", Neal Stephenson spent a lot of time thinking about some of the likely robots of the future, the nanobots. Even to the point of conceptualizing nanobot warfare, and the resultant smog of the carnage. Probably too small for the hats, and the nanohat is probably just absurd. The robot, the future, or the hat?

Everything2 isn't much help on the subject.
Google just offers nonsense.

Turns out, Digg has the answer. The future of robotics involves a crimson fedora.

But this is just one idea, and one path to follow. Maybe you've got another idea (comment!), maybe you've got a different perspective (comment!)

-transiit