In 2011, we have precrime. See video of those arrested for planning on staging street theatre to protest royal wedding.
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOli98fgBP0" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOli98fgBP0</a> [01:15]<p>"This is minority report! Pre-crime! We're being arrested for street theater."<p>It's amazing how well the British do fascism, complete with a bit of descent into absurdist comedy. Life imitates Terry Pratchett.
A small detail I found interesting while watching Minority Report recently: among all the futuristic innovations displayed and mentioned in this article, when it began to rain, people still opened up traditional black umbrellas.
Spielberg tried very hard to create a believable near future. He invited a collection of futurists to brainstorm ideas and implemented those ideas in the film.<p><a href="http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/spielberg.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/spielberg.html?pg=1...</a>
Interesting aside: The UI shown in Minority Report was actually developed by a team at MIT: <a href="http://goo.gl/tRLXO" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/tRLXO</a>
Minority Report was one of my favorite movies, precisely because it's liberal use of attainable sci-fi, stuff which was being researched and thought to be attainable en masse in 5-10 years (like e-ink, gesture based interfaces, etc...)<p>In many ways, I think a really well written sci-fi book, and especially a movie, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. In which case, the movie would be making a proposition rather than a prediction :)
Hm, interesting. I only saw the movie about a month ago (and didn't even like it much) but it never occurred to me that the movie predicted anything correctly. I suppose because I took it out of context (in 2011, I took the things mentioned the article mostly for granted).<p>Actually, the future predicted by the movie is pretty scary, in particular:<p>- Automated cars that can be remotely controlled by the government<p>- Eye-based identification everywhere<p>I wouldn't wanna live in such a place :/
I hate to be "that guy", but the language in this article is really poor in both grammar and style, and it could use some editing to help with that. Are thenextweb articles normally copy-edited?
Scott Adams wrote in The Dilbert Future that life would become more like Star Trek.<p>I heard once that the imagination of science fiction is the same imagination of innovation. That life becomes more and more like science fiction because actually building something is the next step after coming up with the idea,
Wasn't the movie set in 2050 or so? IIRC Hal Finney reviewed it at the time as plausible for the next few decades but ridiculously conservative for 50 years. I thought that was about right. (I didn't expect to see self-driving cars quite so soon.)
I remember reading about an (now ex) RCMP officer from BC, Canada created an application that took all sorts of data from crimes and combined it to create kind of a heat map/"elevation" of predictions where the criminal may be based.<p>That's about as close as you could get to Minority Report (this was earlier than the movie) but it used ongoing series of crimes to predict where the crimes may occur or to narrow down where the criminal may live.<p>It's not the IBM software mentioned in the article this was from Canada and I distinctly remember it was an RCMP officer who created it.
Looking at the difference between the Microsoft Kinnect and the Apple iPad demos, the marvel is how Microsoft manages to make something really amazing both boring and uncool, while Apple spends 15 seconds and inspires. Fortunately, the Kinnect is a great enough device people seem to have discovered it in spite of their marketing.<p>Don't miss the "What's around the corner" video.