It has a future.
Also, this taken from the TIME article (I mentioned a world full of Jerry Nadlers in an earlier response to this)
A device that reduces the need for walking, one of the healthiest activities known to man, may strike many people as the last thing our culture needs. (Kamen scoffs, "Because I give kids calculators doesn't make them stupider.")
Oh? It doesn't??? How many of these so called high school grads of today, working at any of our fast food palaces, do you think would be able to accurately calculate change if that functionality died in their computerized cash registers????
Sometimes you have to leave the house and it's too far to walk, but you don't want to take your car, plane, flying platform, rocketpack, hovercraft or autogiro. This would be perfect for those kinds of little errands. At least until they work those last few kinks out of teleportation.
I'm getting one for myself, ... and one for my dog.
Kamen's aspirations are even grander than that. He believes the Segway "will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy." He imagines them everywhere: in parks and at Disneyland, on battlefields and factory floors, but especially on downtown sidewalks from Seattle to Shanghai. "Cars are great for going long distances," Kamen says, "but it makes no sense at all for people in cities to use a 4,000-lb. piece of metal to haul their 150-lb. asses around town." In the future he envisions, cars will be banished from urban centers to make room for millions of "empowered pedestrians"--empowered, naturally, by Kamen's brainchild.
Kamen isn't so naive as to underestimate America's long-standing romance with the automobile. ("I love cars too," he says. "Just not when I'm downtown.") And he is well aware that uprooting the vast urban infrastructure that supports cars, from parking garages to bridges and tunnels, won't happen soon. Which is why he has pinned his greatest hopes not on the U.S. but abroad, especially in the developing world. At a meeting with Jobs a year ago, the Apple co-founder proclaimed, in typically hyperbolic fashion, "If enough people see this machine, you won't have to convince them to architect cities around it; it'll just happen."
Kamen agrees. "Most people in the developing world can't afford cars, and if they could, it would be a complete disaster," he says. "If you were building one of the new cities of China, would you do it the way we have? Wouldn't it make more sense to build a mass-transit system around the city and leave the central couple of square miles for pedestrians only?" Pedestrians and people riding Segways, that is.
"There's no question in my mind that we have the right answer," he continues. "I would stake my reputation, my money and my time on the fact that 10 years from now, this will be the way many people in many places get around." Kamen pauses and sighs. "If all we end up with are a few billion-dollar niche markets, that would be a disappointment. It's not like our goal was just to put the golf-cart industry out of business."
Kamen's dream is rather thinly veiled in this report. With no automobiles allowed in urban centers and mass-transit on the periferee, guess what the plan is for the internal combustion engine. The private short and long term conveyance that gave us the freedom to travel as we wished with little or no monitering is only a dream away from extinction. While I do find it an interesting idea that our interdependance on foreign oil might be greatly reduced, leave it to the mind of a Liberal to dream of the complete destruction of the internal combustion engine. Along with that demise comes the complete monitoring of almost all travel within the US.
Has anyone asked Kamen what his prognosis is for attractive young women traveling in urban centers after dark, with no protection around them? Unarmed and unable to lock out the riff raff, they'll be sitting ducks.
Ah the liberal mind, it's a wonder it doesn't cave in on itself before it can do any damage.
Socialisms wet dream for a brave new world.