Scanners; communicators; computers – as exciting as the technology of the future can be, absolutely none of it matters without a constant connection to ... somewhere else. And the same goes for the technology of the present: every time you ask Alexa to play a song, or send your exercise stats to your Fitness Friends group chat, or navigate to a new part of town, you're relying on a connection that we used to call "going online" back when far fewer people were "on the internet." Here's how today's technology keeps most of the planet constantly connected.

From Total Recall's Johnny Cab to Minority Report's Lexuses of 2054, the self-driving car has co-starred opposite countless future-dwellers, a perennial signifier that "hey, this movie is set in the F U T U R E!" But about five years ago, the whole idea of a car that could drive you (instead of the other way around) started to get a lot closer to science fact than fiction. Michael Fisher (aka Captain2Phones) chats with author and podcaster Edward Niedermeyer about how far we’ve come with self-driving cars and what challenges lie ahead.

The Star Trek communicator; the Dick Tracy radio watch; the Teenage Mutant Ninja 'Turtle-Com.' For decades, science fiction and fantasy forecasted futuristic two-way radios that seemed fantastical at the time – but today, 7 billion people carry them in their everyday lives. Dr. Marty Cooper, the inventor of the cell phone, joins Michael Fisher (aka Captain2Phones) to explain how the modern cellular phone went from pie-in-the-sky pipe dream to ubiquitous commodity.