

The surprising accuracy of Minority Report 10 years later - cdp
http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/05/12/entering-the-minority-report-era-a-video-series/

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rms
In 2011, we have precrime. See video of those arrested for planning on staging
street theatre to protest royal wedding.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOli98fgBP0> [01:15]

"This is minority report! Pre-crime! We're being arrested for street theater."

It's amazing how well the British do fascism, complete with a bit of descent
into absurdist comedy. Life imitates Terry Pratchett.

~~~
Joakal
Pre2011, there's attempted crimes like murder, conspiracy to commit like
fraud, and even thought crimes where discussing a bomb in a cafe can land you
in indefinite imprisonment.

Minority report is distinctly different in that there's 100% assurance that a
crime has been committed in the future, therefore the suspects are guilty.

[SPOILER BELOW]

As plot progresses, it is found that reading the computer that looks towards
the future are human and there's no 100% certainty due to paradoxes among
other past life twists. This lead to release of all prisoners (I think).

------
gr366
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.

~~~
cheez
Some inventions can't be improved?

~~~
evo_9
<http://www.nubrella.com/>

~~~
hugh3
An honest attempt to improve the umbrella, perhaps, but it looks both
ridiculous and claustrophobic. (edit: Why _do_ we describe small spaces as
claustrophobic rather than claustrophobia-inducing? We don't describe spiders
as arachnophobic or wide open spaces as agoraphobic, do we?)

There must be a better solution to umbrellas getting inverted. Why do they
even have to bend that way?

~~~
mechanical_fish
If you make the umbrella ribs more rigid you will tend to make them heavier.
You could improve the leverage of the braces between the stem and the ribs by
attaching the braces farther out on the ribs and lower down on the stem, but
that will collide with the owner's head unless they hold the umbrella higher,
which will cause more leakage and catch more wind and make it harder to brace
the stem against your body in a wind.

I'd be very hesitant to claim that I could design a better umbrella. They've
been evolving for a very long time. Maybe modern materials would help, but I
for one wouldn't dare buy a carbon-fiber umbrella because I just know I'd
leave it on a bus or something. Cheapness is a feature too.

Meanwhile, the hilarious invention at the link not only looks ridiculous, but
I'd have to be convinced that it wouldn't drip all over my lower body. And how
on earth do you carry it when it's folded up? A big feature of the standard
umbrella design is that it's not that hard to carry or store while folded.

I have a nice waterproof hat from Outdoor Research and a Gore-Tex jacket. For
serious swimming I've also got waterproof pants and even gaiters. That
combination seems like it would be superior to the space helmet.

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Tiktaalik
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.

[http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/spielberg.html?pg=1...](http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/spielberg.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=)

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pkarbe
Interesting aside: The UI shown in Minority Report was actually developed by a
team at MIT: <http://goo.gl/tRLXO>

~~~
ThomPete
Casey Reas and Ben Fry, the two guys behind Processing.org

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juiceandjuice
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...)

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 :)

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hasenj
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).

Actually, the future predicted by the movie is pretty scary, in particular:

\- Automated cars that can be remotely controlled by the government

\- Eye-based identification everywhere

I wouldn't wanna live in such a place :/

~~~
BrandonM
I'm renting a Ford Edge right now. After a few minutes, the radio will mute
itself until you buckle your seatbelt. The car is configured to limit your
speed to 80 MPH or under.

Even though I drive with my seatbelt on under 80 MPH anyways, it's really
annoying for my car to tell me what to do.

~~~
mey
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyKey>

It should be configurable, the rental company probably programmed the key they
gave you.

When I rented a Penske truck, it was speed limited to 75mph, which I don't
object too, 26" diesel truck over 75mph is a scary thing, even when going in a
straight line through fields of corn.

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ladon86
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?

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phamilton
Scott Adams wrote in The Dilbert Future that life would become more like Star
Trek.

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,

~~~
nkassis
I think it's mostly because science fiction molds are view of the future and
many inventors are influenced by that. I'm pretty sure that Star Trek
influenced some of the inventors of the cell phone even if it wasn't
consciously. Now we have things that are looking closer and closer to
holodecks (all we need is photonic matter), the kinect is pretty proto-
holodeck in my view. The touchscreen interfaces and iPads were probably also
influcence by Sci-Fi. Basically Star Trek invented the future ;p

~~~
jonnathanson
There's actually some truth to this. Cool sci-fi can influence scientists and
technologists to pursue ideas they see on screen or read about in books.
Alternatively, it can inspire kids to want to _become_ scientists or
technologists. While I have no data to back this up, I imagine the genre has
done a lot more good for the world than we'll ever know.

~~~
currywurst
Watch this presentation to get an overview of how we can learn from sci-fi
interfaces : <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMIyO8F0jxg>

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abecedarius
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.)

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dhughes
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.

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.

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.

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DannoHung
Was anyone else seriously pissed that the Spielberg version missed the entire
point of the Dick story?

~~~
hugh3
What was the point of the Dick story?

Movie adaptations of science fiction short stories often have a way of missing
the point. Sometimes it's an improvement, sometimes it isn't.

The bit about Minority Report that I didn't like (and I think this point was
made by somebody else at the time but I can't remember who it was) is as
follows: the movie starts off by saying _"Let's suppose that there's some
psychic system that allows us to predict crimes before they occur!"_ "Gee okay
movie" I say, "that sounds pretty implausible but I'll go along with it".
_"And then"_ says the movie _"the big twist at the end is.... sometimes it
doesn't work!"_

It feels like a cheap sort of ending because, well, I never would have thought
it _could_ work until the logic of the story demanded it. It feels like the
movie is trying to make some kind of point about free will, but it's not only
keeping its thumb on the scale, it's also keeping its other thumb on the other
side of the scale, making the discussion pointless. Free will is nonexistent,
it says, because of this hypothetical device which could never exist in the
real world. Except, oh wait, the device doesn't work because there's free
will. The end.

~~~
TheEzEzz
My understanding was that the device did work there was just a human element
to the interpretation.

~~~
nemeth
The last scene of the movie demonstrates that knowing that a pre-crime report
was generated does allow the future to be changed (Burgess chooses to shoot
himself, rather than Tom Cruise). The earlier plotline had suggested there was
no way to escape fate - the protagonist ends up committing the exact killing
he had been desperately trying to avoid (a la _Oedipus Rex_ ).

~~~
waterlesscloud
At the time the film came out, I was in a long involved argument about the
theme of the film on screenwriting board.

There, I said:

"The issue of her predicting the future as it actually ends up taking place is
more or less irrelevant in terms of the story the filmmakers chose to tell.
That's set up from the very first precognition and subsequent raid. Agatha
sees a murder that does not happen, because there is interevention. The
premise underlying the story the filmmakers chose to tell us is that what she
sees will in fact occur if we do not stop it. We are free to stop it, of
course, but only because we know it is coming. If we didn't know, the world
would continue on the rails it has been traveling on, and it would arrive at
the destination Agatha has foreseen. This is the essential point that you have
to buy into for the premise to work at all."

I dig a little deeper here, including analysis of the eye transplant scene.
With a bit of a snarky tone, but I was arguing with friends...

[http://www.wordplayer.com/forums/moviesarc05/index.cgi?read=...](http://www.wordplayer.com/forums/moviesarc05/index.cgi?read=34716)

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gallerytungsten
What's really sad about that article is the failure to mention the origin of
the ideas: Philip K. Dick.

~~~
warwick
Dick isn't the source of most of the ideas discussed in the article. Minority
Report is a pretty short read, and well worth the hour or two it takes.

Social Advertising: There isn't any advertising. The only media that's
referenced is the radio which is a broadcast medium, and as such can't be
individually tuned.

Virtual Shopping: Anderton buys some essentials at a drugstore, and a second
hand set of clothes. It's important to the plot of the story that he takes the
risk of exposing himself to get these items.

Crime: Alright, I'll give you that one. Pre crime is a cool concept.

Robots: The only automatic machines mentioned in the story are those that tend
to the needs of the pre cogs (presumably life support type stuff) and things
like automatic card printers. Hardly robotic spiders.

Gesture Based Computing: In the story, Anderton has to lookup where data will
be stored on a tape and manually copy it to another reel of tape. That's as
close as he gets to a cool interface.

Cars: Flying cars feature into the story, but they required a human driver.
Anderton has to ask his wife to take the wheel at one point as he has to deal
with something else.

Sometimes it's alright to acknowledge that an adaptation of a work has added
to it.

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jared314
I think the article has it backwards. The movie used technology that was being
developed and took it to a logical conclusion.

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veb
Warning: Once you start reading, your productivity will go out the window.
Awesome article.

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aneth
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.

Don't miss the "What's around the corner" video.

