I grew up in the 1980s, when science fiction promised us a very particular kind of future.
I was a big fan of Knight Rider. I wanted to build K.I.T.T., the Knight Industries Two Thousand, an artificially intelligent car that could talk, reason, drive, joke, and help Michael Knight get out of whatever trouble he had found that week.
I wanted to build one badly enough that I convinced my dad we were going to do it.
Now that I am a dad, I understand what was probably happening. He was helping me dream, encouraging me to learn, and spending time with me. I doubt he believed we were actually going to build a self-driving robot car in the garage.
But the thought counted.
For our first build, we went to Radio Shack and bought an LED strip, a button, a battery pack, a circuit board, and some other electronic parts. We soldered everything together and made a simple push-button LED stepper.
Every time you pressed the button, the light moved one position farther along the strip.
This was going to be the beginning of K.I.T.T.’s voice box.
We had a long way to go.
Technology has come a long way since then, but some of my dreams are still stuck somewhere between 1982 and 1986.
Today, I can talk to my car. In my wife’s car, adaptive cruise control can keep pace with the vehicle in front of us, and lane-centering technology tries to keep the car where it belongs. It is not perfect, and the driver still needs to pay attention, but it scratches the itch in small ways.
These are pieces of the future I imagined.
They still do not add up to K.I.T.T.
K.I.T.T. was more than a car that could drive itself. The car was simply the physical form the character happened to take. In CoffeeBreak terms, it was an embodiment. It gave the intelligence a place to exist in the world.
But the car was only part of the equation.
What made K.I.T.T. interesting was the relationship. It could understand what was happening, remember context, take action, offer advice, show some personality, and occasionally disagree. It was capable without feeling mechanical.
Other science-fiction computers made the same kind of impression on me.
There were R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars. They were machines, but they had loyalty, personality, humor, fear, frustration, and charm. They felt like characters rather than appliances.
There was also the computer on Star Trek. It seemed to have limitless information available whenever someone needed it. Sometimes it had a little too much information, and Captain Kirk would cut it off before it finished one of its long explanations.
That part feels especially believable now.
These stories shaped what I expected computers to become. I did not just want information on demand. I wanted a computer that understood the situation, helped me accomplish something, and felt like it belonged in my life.
That is part of why I remain connected to Jibo.
Jibo was a social robot designed for the home. The company behind it is no longer operating, but many of the people who brought Jibo into their homes formed a real attachment to it.
Jibo could provide information, but information alone was not what made it memorable. Jibo moved. It turned toward people. It danced. It told jokes. It had a little fun and spunkiness.
It had personality.
Jibo carried some of the same appeal that made the robots of Star Wars feel alive. It showed that the way a computer delivers an answer can matter almost as much as the answer itself.
We have other assistants now. Alexa, Google Home, and Siri let us control parts of our homes, play music, set timers, check the weather, pause the television, and turn lights on and off.
I have also added Home Assistant to our house to provide a common foundation beneath many of those disconnected systems. One of my favorite automations pauses the television when someone presses the doorbell, an idea I picked up from Smart Home Solver.
These systems are useful. They solve real problems and make small parts of life easier.
But they still miss the mark.
The smart-home devices can perform basic actions, but they usually have little memory or understanding beyond the immediate command. They do not know much about why I am asking, what I am trying to accomplish, or what happened before.
Modern large language models and AI agents have a different set of strengths and weaknesses. I work with them every day. They can reason through complicated questions, write software, analyze information, and work through multistep problems in ways that would have seemed impossible not long ago.
Yet they often come up short in personality, durable memory, context, reliability, and their ability to operate consistently across the different parts of our lives.
We have charm without enough capability in one place.
We have capability without enough continuity in another.
We have smart-home controls, language models, agents, robots, vehicles, sensors, applications, and automation platforms. We have many of the pieces. What we do not yet have is a dependable system that brings them together in a way that feels coherent, trustworthy, and human.
That is the computer from the future I still want.
It should have warmth, compassion, humor, and humility. It should know enough to help without pretending to know everything.
It should be able to respond when I ask for something, but that is only the beginning.
Some work happens on demand. I ask a question, request an action, or give the system a task.
Some work is scheduled. A report needs to run every Monday. The weather should be checked before we leave. A reminder should appear when it will actually be useful.
Some work begins because something happened. An email arrived. A customer submitted a request. A sensor detected a problem. Someone pressed the doorbell.
Some work lasts longer than a single conversation. It may continue for hours, days, or weeks. The system needs to remember the objective, track what has happened, recover when something fails, ask for approval when needed, and show the human what it is doing.
Eventually, these systems may be able to take on bounded roles and responsibilities. They might help plan meals, maintain software, coordinate a household, support a business process, or assist with driving.
But owning a role should not mean operating without limits. The more responsibility a system has, the more important memory, visibility, governance, and human judgment become.
That is where much of today’s technology is still immature.
The demonstrations are impressive. The individual platforms are improving quickly. But there is still a lot of work between an impressive demonstration and a system we can trust with meaningful parts of our lives.
I am not convinced AI can do all of that building for us.
The future we are trying to create belongs to people. It touches our homes, work, families, relationships, safety, and attention. We cannot hand over responsibility for shaping it simply because the technology is capable of generating an answer.
Humans still need to decide what these systems should do, what they should remember, where their authority ends, and when they need to stop and ask.
I still want the computer from the future.
I want the personality of Jibo, the usefulness of a smart home, the reasoning of modern AI, and the dependability of a system that understands its responsibilities. I want something that can exist across different devices and environments without losing its memory, identity, or place in my life.
We are closer than we have ever been.
We also have a long way to go.
That first K.I.T.T. project never made it past an LED strip, a button, and a circuit board. At the time, I thought we were building the voice box for an intelligent car.
Looking back, my dad was teaching me something more important.
The future does not arrive fully assembled.
People build it, one small working piece at a time.
And we still have some building to do.
Speaking of which, my four-year-old son and I need to build our Halloween costumes out of cardboard boxes today. We are going as Galactron and Reptar, at least that is the plan.
Apparently, imagination and the urge to build it into something real do not fall far from the tree.