Thanks to mankind's finest inventors, we may never have to move our bodies again, except for subtle nods of the head when demanding more pizza.

From the inventor of the heart stent used by Vice President Dick Cheney, a wheelchair that climbs stairs and the first portable kidney dialysis machine, here comes the Segway Human Transporter – a device that will do all our walking for us.

You step onto a platform that has a handle bar sticking up from it and two platter-sized wheels on either side of your feet. If you lean slightly forward, it goes forward. If you lean slightly back, it stops. If you press the handlebar ever so slightly, it turns. One 10-cent battery charge will last up to 15 miles, and the entire apparatus stays upright in seeming defiance of gravity. The thing is a damn miracle, and it's going to turn us all into indolent, porcine bags of goo.

At last, we're free to let our stomachs balloon out and morph into a moonscape of cellulite and bed sores. Free to cultivate a fine, smooth marbling in our pink and useless thighs and grow royal flaps of flying-squirrel fat under our arms. Free to let our rear ends wobble and burst like a water balloon.

Perhaps I'm not making myself clear.

As this nation battles an enemy who travels a hundred miles a day through the desert living only on pita bread and crickets, we're finally eliminating the last bit of exercise that commonly comes up anymore in civilian life. The American dream is within reach – that every man, whether rich or poor, can grow cleavage.

Critics have downplayed the likely impact of the Segway Human Transporter, probably in reaction to all the hype that surrounded it before we even knew what it was. For several months, rumors dripped steadily through the Internet about something known mostly as IT, an earth-shaking but unidentified thigamabob that was going to be bigger than the Internet or personal computers or that stuff they sell at head shops that puts you in the bathroom all day before you take a drug test.

IT's inventors hope this doohickey will replace cars for short-distance travel in the city. But of course, people already have options for that – motor scooters, cabs or just leaving your job at lunchtime and turning up three years later among the Taliban. With a top speed of 12 mph, however, the Segway Human Transporter is not even classified as a vehicle by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the only things this miraculous device is likely to replace are our legs.

This would seem to make it useful just for people who walk a lot for a living (such as postal workers) or people who have trouble moving quickly (such as heart patients, the elderly and anyone who walks in front of me with a shopping cart). Critics have concluded from this that IT is no big deal – that IT is not "it."

They are so totally wrong.

A model entering the consumer market in a year or so will weight only 65 pounds and cost $3,000. You probably can stick the transporter in the back of a truck or SUV, or maybe even fold it up into the trunk of a standard sedan. If so, someone is bound to make the argument that you need the Segway Human Transporter in case of an emergency. From there, it's only a short leap to say you'd be a reckless, irresponsible sociopath not to have it. What's the matter, don't you love your kids?

Of course you do. You love them so much, you're going to let them ride around on this thing until they turn into whiny balls of tallow who'd give themselves a coronary if they tried to put on their pants.

Next comes a device that chews your food for you and pours it into your stomach in a predigested paste. Don't you care about your family's teeth? And how about a machine that does your breathing for you – or would you rather kill your wife?

After that, we'll just need a machine for mankind's only remaining burden – to stare blankly like a goldfish in a PCP coma and occasionally vomit on ourselves.

That's going to be just freakin' great.