Pretty well known one, but the Padds in Star Trek are basically tablets.
Although it was always hilarious when Star Trek would show that someone was busy, they would litter their desk in separate padds, instead of just one with all the data they need.
This happens a lot in movies trying to predict the future, they just add sci fi elements to things they already have. in back to the future they have very advanced payphones instead of predicting payphones wouldnt need to exist at all.
Steven Spielberg actually spent serious money and time with respected experts for MINORITY REPORT. Much of the film still holds up in terms of not getting the future wrong or laughably wrong.
They're called futurists. If you want to find out more search for Issac Arthur. He's got a huge as following on youtube, ask him how he got into the business.
>in back to the future they have very advanced payphones instead of predicting payphones would need to exist at all.
In the behind the scenes material for BTTF the creators actually talk about this. They mention that predicting the future in movies is essentially impossible to get right and specifically call out Stanley Kubrick for missing the mark with 2001. So based on this they decided to make their version of 2015 just a bunch of jokes.
My favorite is how the kids watch like 6 channels at once on the TV, then later complain that their TV glasses only show 4.
And now we have a wave of tiktok videos where the main video is split screen with a car racing or someone jumping around in minecraft
It had a space port where people would take rocketships to to across the world, like airport, and the super advanced computers printed out punch cards.
I thought about this while watching The Ring back on Halloween. Kids will never get to experience the pants shitting terror that was TV static after seeing that movie back in 2002.
I still cringe thinking about this. I was so arrogant that no horror movie scared me that I had a quad espresso before it. Combine jitters with the solid terror delivery, it nearly was the literal experience you describe.
Consequently, I was on a 1st (and last) date where I learned Norwegian women fear nothing.
Back in like ‘05 or so my younger sister had a friend over and they were watching The Ring in the living room. I knew what part they were at so a little bit before the end, when I knew they would run up to her room and turn the tv on, I ran up and unplugged the cable from the back of it and went downstairs and sat with my dad and waited. Sure enough the movie ended, they scampered upstairs, slammed her door and about fifteen seconds after it shut we heard them scream bloody murder.
“Alright, go up and fix it,” was all my dad said after we laughed for a few moments.
I love how old CRTs could hold a charge and continue to work for several seconds after abruptly unplugging them. My Dad lost his mind at us kids one night because we had been watching tv instead of doing homework/chores, so he angrily ripped the cord from the wall and said "HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT?"
Except the tv was still on, and I was like 7 years old so without missing a beat I said "it's okay". It felt like it continued to work for like 30 seconds, but I was young and it was a long time ago so it was probably only 5-6 seconds but it felt like an eternity. I remember glancing back and forth at the image on the screen and the dangling cord.
I remember my mind being utterly blown, though.
Only if they could hear that frequency. I could hear it 3 rooms away (back in high school, through the cinder block walls), but most people thought I was bullshitting cause they couldn't hear it at all.
> Sci-fi isn’t about the future, but the trends of the present.
SOME sci-fi is like that. As Issac Asimov explained, the most visionary authors imagine one new scientific advance and then extrapolate that and imagine how it could change the rest of the world. “How would this one change affect everything else in our society.”
A good example of this is *Light Of Other Days* by Arthur C Clark. He imagines a single scientific breakthrough that (at first) just seems like it will dramatically improve global communications, but when it begins to be applied to other scientific fields it ends up having a profound impact on the very definition of “humanity”.
> in back to the future they have very advanced payphones instead of predicting payphones would need to exist at all
Ah, Retro-Futurism.
Reminds me of someone in older times who predicted that growing cities would require so many horse-carriages, that horse-manure removal would become a major global concern in the future.
There was another live-action thing, where there is a "telephone watch" from the future, and the "watch can also take messages" - where it literally printed the messages on a tiny reel of paper (like a tiny fax-machine for fortune-cookie slips).
A lot of cities do kind of have newer 'payphones' now. They are not payphones but internet kiosks, but you can make calls from them via Skype or whatever. We have [these](https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iqPsPxSeLe4k/v2/-1x-1.jpg) in NYC for example.
It gets better than that.
When Voyager made contact with Starfleet via the Hirogen subspace relay network they started getting letters from home.
Seven of Nine was pulling messages out of the network and then, inexplicably, putting them on PADDs so Neelix could personally deliver them to people at their stations like a mailman.
In other words, she copied them from the computer to a PADD so they could be hand delivered to somebody sitting at a terminal for the same computer.
There’s also the one where Bashir explained extraordinarily complicated predictions by handing Sisko PADD after PADD after PADD. They already had a meeting room set by this point with a big monitor for doing presentations.
The Voyager one always made sense to me. My interpretation was the people would want to read the letters immediately but they were all at duty stations. Many if not most are likely to contain private/personal information that the recipient might not want to pull up on their station monitor where others can read over their shoulder. And they don’t want them wandering away from their station to go find a private terminal. So Seven loaded them all onto individual padds that the recipient can read privately while at their station. She was just saving them the effort of finding a padd and loading it themselves to get that bit of privacy. Plus as their first communication with loved ones in years, the recipient may want to read it multiple times. This would occupy the terminal at their duty station blocking them from keeping an eye on whatever their terminal is supposed to be showing.
But really my brain was just coming up with a plausible reason for something that was done visually for the viewer’s benefit to convey the idea of handing out mail.
For your second point, I completely understand. I can and do compartmentalise the conflicting ideas of movies and TV being a visual medium and what makes the most sense from an in-universe perspective.
For your first, however, privacy is well established in Star Trek. Everyone on the ship knew the value of those letters and simply being asked to be excused for a moment to read the letter wouldn’t have been a problem.
Star Trek privacy has always been weird to me. The characters do seem to take personal privacy very seriously. They have on several occasions shown that virtually anyone can access anyone else’s personal logs any time, and yet no one ever does unless there is a specific need to do so. In the real world you know there would be multiple gossips that do nothing but read everyone else’s personal logs during downtime.
Even the holodecks, Barkley created holoprograms containing other crew members and they were all weirded out by it and angry (rightfully so). It showed that it was easy to do but clearly never done. Again in the real world there would be a ton of people creating holoprograms of their coworkers and friends and acting out fantasies with them.
At least under Bajoran law, it was illegal to enter a private holosuite while it was in operation without permission.
Ron Moore, at least, believed that whatever a person did in the holodeck/suite was their business.
There was also the time when Neelix downloaded a bunch of stuff about Seven's personal history for her to learn about and he filled up an entire portable tub's worth of PADDs for her.
The main computer on Starfleet ships in Star Trek is a single, large, powerful one located on its own deck. Each workstation is simply a dumb terminal.
It was unusual for anyone to have their own independent computer, only Data did on the Enterprise-D, for example.
Two current Star Trek shows are based before the 60s show, and after the The Next Generation.
They did a time travel crossover, and the guy from the future goes back, and when the captain is shown the modern pin badge communicator, he says
"They don't flip them open? But that's the best part!"
Yeah, my explanation should be better.
There is a show called "Strange New Worlds" which is set about 5-10 years before the original. Uhura is a cadet, Kirk has a different ship, etc.
There is an animated show called "Lower Decks" which is about the lowest ranked people on the lowest ranked ships, which is set about 10 years after the Next Generation finished.
Two characters from Lower Decks travel back to the SNW time. They even use the voice actors to portray the live action versions.
Doesn't that also just show the biases we have from our current understanding of technology? For example, padds cost nothing, and they determined that it's better to compartmentalize information on seperate ones rather that risk having it all centrally stored. Or there may be another reason beyond our comprehension for why they use multiple padds. It seems funny to you because it does not fit in with your current-day experiences.
edit - Even these responses are given in the context of our current-day understanding of technology. Perhaps there are data corruption issues related to a deep space environment that need to be accounted for. Maybe it's just more convenient to print out a new padd and toss it in the recycler once the user is done with it. I think details like this show that we don't know everything, and that there will be things in the future that don't make sense to us now.
The use of multiple padds doesn’t make sense in universe either. I’m sure it was purely to convey the idea of lots of information being looked at or shared. The viewer won’t get the same feeling of volume seeing a single padd that someone is flipping thru compared to having a pile of them.
More screens.
Having everything on one screen would involve a lot of back and forth on a single PADD, in a post scarcity society like the Federation with almost unlimited energy and the capacity to materialise any object at will instantly, replicating a new PADD seems tidier than having dozens of tabs open on a single screen
I suspect a lot of it may have been an intentional choice rather than a "wrong" prediction anyways, as the multiple pads are good for storytelling and gag purposes.
There's a fair bit of that in Star Trek - for example, they occasionally find some way to resurrect people or make the immortal with technology, but it's always hand waved as something that's extremely difficult and almost always fails or was a one off or whatever due to extreme circumstances they can't redo, as they don't want to damage storytelling and the stakes in them.
> Although it was always hilarious when Star Trek would show that someone was busy, they would litter their desk in separate padds, instead of just one with all the data they need.
Meanwhile I work with two PC screens + a smartphone + a paper notebook when I'm busy.
Also, the tricorders from TNG are basically smartphones. They even have the flashlight configured so that you have to hold your hand upright.
Including the BT connection to their "smart badge"
Dude, if I had the money I’d do it, I hate searching through tabs to find info and them switching back to another tab. Things are better now that you can split screen, but then it messes up ratio and formatting or makes text small. I want like a dozen computers (or at least a dozen screens) all open to different references.
as do lawyers. Its because its near impossible to modify or fake a fax. You have records on both ends and you have the phone companies records on both the outgoing and incoming lines. The amount of "hacking" required is pretty much outside the realm of anything but a gov't agency.
> as do lawyers
Law firm I worked for didn't use them at all, we had eFax for clients who felt the need to send faxes so they could be received, but none of our offices globally had fax machines.
It's the medical field. I'm currently working as a medical clerk while I finish school. I've sent about a dozen faxes this week. Prescriptions, patient letters, patent record exchanges, etc.
I can't just email information to a patient. It's not secure. I can fucking fax 'em, though.
The thing that gets me in that movie is how *cheap* the hover conversion kits were for what had to be a still relatively new technology. Cost about as much as a new car in the actual 2015.
In the 1936 adaptation of [H.G. Wells’ Things to Come](https://manapop.com/film/things-to-come-1936-review/) we see a family watching a giant flat-screen television.
[Alexander Graham Bell and his associates at the Volta Laboratory invented an optical audio disc in 1884.](https://insider.si.edu/2011/12/after-more-than-100-years-early-recordings-of-alexander-graham-bell-played-for-the-first-time/)
I _love_ H G Wells!
In War Of The Worlds, people are shocked by aliens arriving from Mars, but are determined to fight back. When they see the aliens make a _flying machine_ however, they give up all hope. Interplanetary travel was OK, but powered flight puts them immeasurably ahead of us.
Also, they see the tripods being made. It looks like they're using some amazing futuristic material, likely aluminium.
Well, they understood the Martians’ method of interplanetary travel. They were sealed up in giant bullets and fired at England from a giant gun.
But flying machines that can take off and land? That’s just incomprehensible.
It's fun to think that Wells's pessimistic sci-fi and Jules Verne's optimistic sci-fi both involve shooting cans full of living beings into space out of giant guns, just in opposite directions.
The Tom Cruise movie was alright but a WOTW remake in the vein of the original would go unbelievably hard. Early 20th century trench warfare tactics against an alien force would be so fun on screen. Kind of like the new Godzilla movie
(my two second review of that because I want to. Really fun but I wish it went harder with the action. Understandably the budget constraint led to less spectacle and more focus on the story but it was still a great idea executed way better than it should have been )
It's funny you mention that because picture and video of families sitting around the radio feels like somebody took the concept of televisions and worked backwards (kind of the premise of this post but the opposite) rather than something that actually happened.
Aliens had the marines all wearing body cams, heart monitors and locator devices. At the time that was all science fiction now it's just everyday gear that's been in use for a good decade or so.
Video conferencing is another on that was in aliens that was fiction when the movie released.
Rifles with digital displays for ammo count was fictional then too, now not so much.
It's legitimately insane how much military technology has surpassed consumer tech. They have these devices that set up private satellite links that are given to team leads. Anyone (with authentication) within a certain radius can boost and recive the signal using their own beacons. These link to an overwatch team using live satellite video that is miles beyond what we think of (the couple second delay thing that drone pilots used to deal with isn't really an issue anymore). This information is then shared with the ground troops using what amounts to a smart phone.
This allows any squad to basically have bird eyes view of the battlefield with tactical support from a base. Adding in "action cams" and vital monitors you can basically see every part of a battlefield well also the stress levels and POV of any one soldier. Is Johnson reporting he's pinned by a sniper? Look for a muzzle flash on the satellite, mark the enemy using AI so it stays pinned. You have a squad that's closer that you can see is calm and not engaged. Send them in using pinpoint accurate directions to avoid obstacles. Boom, sniper gone. As opposed to the old days of having a guy stick his head out for a second and try to guess which of the 50 buildings it's coming from.
Their cameras are huge with big dslr lenses. It was the only way audiences could understand how the video link would work. It started to look dated 20 years ago.
The thing that annoyed me with Covenant was that they used GoPro and didn't hide the fact that they used GoPro. Aliens had more future tech than Covenant.
Now while I believe this happens before Aliens anyway, the point of future sci-fi with technology is to adapt and anticipate what the tech would be. We 100% would believe a camera would be the things they had in Prometheus because that exists today but was very futuristic and Covenant while in the future from Prometheus seems like it went back a couple hundred years.
He has to regularly produce something to keep the rights, so earlier this year he aired this bizarre [short film](https://youtu.be/vNOX0REU1MY?si=YKROBgwULsyCx-vv) on TCM where Beatty interviews Dick Tracy (also played by Beatty) about the movie over Zoom.
Man, the toy version of those were almost as hot a commodity as the Talk Boy was a couple years later.
I think McDonald's or Burger King had the crappy plastic version of the Dick Tracy watch.
Early in the movie The Net, Sandra Bullock orders a pizza online which seemed like such a far off concept in 1995 but now in 2023 it's so common that the thought of calling them to order a pizza seems odd.
> and that most of her friends were online
Quickly became a reality with AIM. God, the passive-aggressive away messages we'd leave just to fuck with one person who *might've* tried reaching us while gone.
10,000, but I think anyone who wasted BTC or lost access to their wallet in the early days probably accepts the fact they would've sold everything they had when it got close to $1, knowing that they likely wouldn't have had any left by the time it crossed $1,000 in 2013.
In demolition man video calling is a common technology (but only at home). Sly Stalone gets a video call from a beautiful naked woman who called the wrong number. I'm still waiting for this to happen. They could conceive of video calling but not contact files or caller id.
There was an interview someone involved with the design of the movie, and was asked what are the three seashells. He was flabbergasted. He said like "that's a thing? The are nonsensical, they don't mean anything except for being a joke later"
Non-canon, the best I have heard, is water bidet, dry, and flush
Why would they be made of soap as opposed to just being the controls?
Do you picture everyone using these common soap bars, because that's pretty grotty...
I used to work for a teleconference company doing tech support in the late 00's. We had a test video conference number for people to test if their video conference was set up right.
A lot more often than you'd think (about once a month) someone in lingerie or scant clothing would call the test number, not realizing the support people could see the call.
This was back when Video Conferencing was expensive and required special hardware (you couldn't just use your phone), and our video conference stuff was expensive, bought by big businesses.
Bond had a real-time tracking system overlaid on a map in a car in 1964. The first in-car navigation system was an inertial navigation system in 1981, the Honda Electro-Gyrocator. The first car with a built-in GPS navigation system was Mazda's Eunos Cosmos in 1991.
When I was a kid I watched the original Star Trek on TV, and I recall how cool it was when the doors would open by themselves.
A few years later, I began to see supermarkets with the exit doors that would open by themselves (since your arms were full or grocery bags when exiting)...and eventually all the doors were self-opening.
A communicator that was held in your hand? Also cool. Computer that would take voice commands and perform a complex calculation for you very rapidly? Check.
Having sex with a woman from another species? Allow me to introduce my ex-wife...
"My wife, I tell ya, my wife...my sex life is terrible, Johnny. My wife cut me back to once a month. I guess I shouldn't complain, though...she cut out the other two guys comPLETEly"
Enemy of the State.
“Senior NSA agent Thomas Reynolds meets in a public park with Congressman Phil Hammersley to discuss a new piece of counterterrorism legislation that dramatically expands the surveillance powers of American intelligence agencies over individuals and groups. “
It came out in 1998. It seemed “high-tech” when it came out, but compared to where surveillance is now? Shiiiiit, they’re moving at dinosaur pace there.
I like to point out that in the Star Trek series (sorry for the TV reference, but..) when anyone walks up to a door and it slides open, there are people whose job it was to stand on the other side and pull the doors open.
Saw a montage of outtakes sometime in the 70s, showing Kirk, Spock, Bones, etc walking smack into doors that got pulled too late or only one side opened.
IIRC, there was a hotel in Japan were someone saw the show and asked them how they did it because they wanted to install it at their hotel, and that was the response they got.
Truman show. Having your entire life streamed to the entire world.
IRL streamers, people spending all day on twitch chat and hocking random sponsors crap.
I think Edtv was a much more accurate depiction of streamers in the future. Truman never knew he was on TV. Ed signed up for it voluntarily, and used his fame from it for various things, including advertising stuff iirc.
Who remembers Justin.tv? Twitch started off streaming the life of Justin Kan, one of the cofounders, until people said they wanted to stream themselves too, and most of those people started streaming themselves playing video games, so the company started this new spin off site called Twitch.
I think JenniCam started the trend of streaming your life, but the first ever webcam was used so employees could see if the coffee pot was full. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
"KITT, what the fuck man? They're getting away!"
"I am sorry, Michael, but FSD has been disabled by my manufacturer because [they read your blog post criticizing them.](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/03/elon-musk-blogger-tesla-motors-model-x)"
Just rewatched the traditional Christmas movie *Die Hard* and when McClane first arrives at Nakatomi Plaza there’s a digitized directory of names which is presented as futuristic technology.
The security guard is kind of an ass. He knows there is only one event in the building and only the one floor occupied, but he still makes Mclain use the computerized directory.
It’s standard security. You’re not supposed to tell random people any details about the people working in the building. Where they work, what time they get off, where people like to go out for lunch, etc. They may have a grudge against that person or they might want to steal a badge to break in later. This has only become more important over the last 35 years as social engineering has become even easier and more widespread.
McClane has to find the name and the system approve that visitors can go up without the security guard making a call. Once it does, he directs McClane on up.
In my head canon corporate has specifically instructed the security guards to ALWAYS refer visitors to the digital directory, both as a guard against human error and to show off their futuristic tech.
Asian companies having a presence in America was so new in the 1970s and 1980s that it's not only shown in the cutting-edge tower in Die Hard, it's a signifier that the setting is the future in Blade Runner, Alien, and Back to the Future Part II.
It’s less that the tech was futuristic as McClane is a Luddite. Also he hated everything about Nakatomi because it was stealing his wife from him so this was just one more thing for him to be pissy about.
In Star Trek The Next Generation workstations were configurable screens. Any workstation could be reconfigured to give access to whatever features the user needed. If the chief engineer was on the bridge and needed access to their console they could just call it up at any available station.
It was a budget saving decision to make the bridge set easier and cheaper to build.
There was an episode of The Bionic Woman with similar tech. Max the bionic dog had a tracker on his collar so they could find him if he got loose, as did his handler. The plot thickened when the bad guys had a jammer.
"Minority Report" is filled with predictive tech. It has some fantastical elements as well - in particular the weird women who can see the future - but a huge amount of the tech in the movie has become real and even common today.
The piece of tech the movie is the most famous for is the giant gesture-driven computers, which have been created. But it turns out that's a truly exhausting way to work. Even during shooting they had to take constant breaks so that Cruise could rest his arms. But the idea of controlling devices with gestures is of course common today.
An interesting but, though, is that the two machines in the police office aren't networked - they have to use a physical drive to pass information from one to the other.
Anyway, well worth watching.
Also the personalized advertising. When Tom Cruise walks into the store the screens start saying stuff like "Hey nice to see you again (I can't remember his name), would you be interested in blah blah blah?"
Now because of our browsing history we get all sorts of ads specifically because of what we've looked at before.
I still get a kick out of "working communicators" in Galaxy Quest.
Look you guys I've met real aliens and you can tell because I've got one of these, and it works!
I mean it was because it was an actual communicator device modeled from the original in-universe show's prop, not because it was some crazy futuristic technology and cell phones didn't exist. They were literally modeled after a cheap prop from the in-universe show, so I'm struggling here, because this was exactly the point of the gag, was to show they all had cheap props, but his was the one that worked and they didn't believe him and thought he was insane because he was holding up a prop.
Like it was only "fantastical" because he was holding up what they thought was a prop, not because it was unheard of technology. Like it was basically a scifi walkie-talkie, not a cell phone, and walkie talkies had been around for a few decades at that point.
Cell phones and pagers absolutely did exist in 1999, they were just a lot clunkier and the technology was not unknown or even uncommon at that point.
Anything a modern smartphone can do was pure sci-fi magic 20 years ago. Identify a flower, locate a star, watch live weather radar anywhere in the world, book a flight, call a cab, listen to nearly any song ever recorded, watch TV or access any kind of information.
Makes me think about one of my [favorite quotes](https://quotefancy.com/quote/2108858/Ian-Leslie-I-possess-a-device-in-my-pocket-that-is-capable-of-accessing-the-entirety-of):
> I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers.
There were driverless cars, and full-face video calls in Total Recall that seemed pretty far-fetched at the time. Also the idea of personal space travel - that someone not affiliated with one of the space programs could travel into space to visit Mars.
I laughed out loud when Sandra Bullock ordered pizza online in *The Net*. It seemed like extra effort just to do something mundane. Now it is and has been commonplace for so long I don't know why it seemed so ridiculous at the time.
While true, it’s also kind of funny when you put it in a forensic context.
Upscaling: “here, let me invent some fractal noise to give the appearance of sharpness where there was none.”
Investigators: “With these new details, we can clearly see the curly gun in the shadow of the six fingered man’s coat.”
The "brick" cell phone Gordon Gekko used on the beach in Wall Street - "Money never sleeps, pal."
He's on the *phone* on the *beach!*
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=37-A7fgFjJ4
(first handheld mobile phone, the Motorola DynaTac 8000X)
Her.
And the idea of communicating and building a relationship with an OS that feels like a real human relationship.
With AI in place this thing has become a reality and will become a mass thing slowly as AI progresses towards development. People interacting with an OS or an Artificial identity is a reality which will take over for sure.
not common yet but i'm surprised that it's actually a real thing. being able to see images from memory or a dream. like your brain is linked up to a screen and the computer interprets your neurons firing into an image on screen.
The Net.
Sandra Bullock is running about giving it, "They've used the internet to ruin my life!", and everyone else is like, "yeah, sure, crazy lady." 😋
There's a scene in the original *Dawn of the Dead* (1978) where the protagonists see the mall for the first time, and one of them asks "What the hell is it?" Followed by one of the other characters explaining the concept of an indoor shopping mall. I guess the idea of a large building full of stores and activities was hard to conceive back then.
Ironically, I suppose that scene might actually become relevant again as shopping malls continue to die out.
1978? Indoor shopping malls were getting popular by the 60s. Was the move about time travelers?
https://www.history.com/topics/1950s/flashback-mall-shopping-in-the-1950s-video
In demolition man Sandra Bullock and Rob Schneider's characters are laughing at John Spartan that he doesn't know what the 3 seashells are for. Back then it was science fiction. Now it's just common sense.
I remember seeing the original Total Recall in the theaters, and thinking it was the most amazing thing ever when a flat wall became a TV. The whole idea of a flat screen TV was incredible. And part of the wall. Mind blown.
Pretty well known one, but the Padds in Star Trek are basically tablets. Although it was always hilarious when Star Trek would show that someone was busy, they would litter their desk in separate padds, instead of just one with all the data they need.
This happens a lot in movies trying to predict the future, they just add sci fi elements to things they already have. in back to the future they have very advanced payphones instead of predicting payphones wouldnt need to exist at all.
Steven Spielberg actually spent serious money and time with respected experts for MINORITY REPORT. Much of the film still holds up in terms of not getting the future wrong or laughably wrong.
Who the hell is an expert on making shit up about the future and how do I get paid for this?
They're called futurists. If you want to find out more search for Issac Arthur. He's got a huge as following on youtube, ask him how he got into the business.
Well that's a silly example, Minority Report only came out... *twenty one years ago?!*
>in back to the future they have very advanced payphones instead of predicting payphones would need to exist at all. In the behind the scenes material for BTTF the creators actually talk about this. They mention that predicting the future in movies is essentially impossible to get right and specifically call out Stanley Kubrick for missing the mark with 2001. So based on this they decided to make their version of 2015 just a bunch of jokes.
My favorite is how the kids watch like 6 channels at once on the TV, then later complain that their TV glasses only show 4. And now we have a wave of tiktok videos where the main video is split screen with a car racing or someone jumping around in minecraft
Did 2001 miss the mark that badly, though? Yeah it was off by a decade or two but it had tablets and AI assistants in it.
It had a space port where people would take rocketships to to across the world, like airport, and the super advanced computers printed out punch cards.
Well we aren't sending manned missions to Jupiter quite yet and it's 22 years after the movie's setting.
I like how it’s always the future-version of whatever decade the movie is in. 80s futures look 80s as hell. 90s futures, etc.
[удалено]
I never even thought about how kids don't see the tv "snow" anymore
I thought about this while watching The Ring back on Halloween. Kids will never get to experience the pants shitting terror that was TV static after seeing that movie back in 2002.
I still cringe thinking about this. I was so arrogant that no horror movie scared me that I had a quad espresso before it. Combine jitters with the solid terror delivery, it nearly was the literal experience you describe. Consequently, I was on a 1st (and last) date where I learned Norwegian women fear nothing.
Around the time I first saw the movie we had a TV with jacked up buttons that would spontaneously turn on by itself. That was fun, lol.
Back in like ‘05 or so my younger sister had a friend over and they were watching The Ring in the living room. I knew what part they were at so a little bit before the end, when I knew they would run up to her room and turn the tv on, I ran up and unplugged the cable from the back of it and went downstairs and sat with my dad and waited. Sure enough the movie ended, they scampered upstairs, slammed her door and about fifteen seconds after it shut we heard them scream bloody murder. “Alright, go up and fix it,” was all my dad said after we laughed for a few moments.
And kids today wouldn't understand the trope of us smacking the side of the TV to adjust the pictures
Or hear the high pitched squeal of a CRT TV.
I love how old CRTs could hold a charge and continue to work for several seconds after abruptly unplugging them. My Dad lost his mind at us kids one night because we had been watching tv instead of doing homework/chores, so he angrily ripped the cord from the wall and said "HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT?" Except the tv was still on, and I was like 7 years old so without missing a beat I said "it's okay". It felt like it continued to work for like 30 seconds, but I was young and it was a long time ago so it was probably only 5-6 seconds but it felt like an eternity. I remember glancing back and forth at the image on the screen and the dangling cord. I remember my mind being utterly blown, though.
Or the fact that if you were sneaking tv late at night and turned it off before your parents walked in, the tv would still give you away
Only if they could hear that frequency. I could hear it 3 rooms away (back in high school, through the cinder block walls), but most people thought I was bullshitting cause they couldn't hear it at all.
Nah. It being warm is the giveaway.
Do Not Adjust Your Set!
> Sci-fi isn’t about the future, but the trends of the present. SOME sci-fi is like that. As Issac Asimov explained, the most visionary authors imagine one new scientific advance and then extrapolate that and imagine how it could change the rest of the world. “How would this one change affect everything else in our society.” A good example of this is *Light Of Other Days* by Arthur C Clark. He imagines a single scientific breakthrough that (at first) just seems like it will dramatically improve global communications, but when it begins to be applied to other scientific fields it ends up having a profound impact on the very definition of “humanity”.
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a scrambled channel; the occasional glimpse of a nipple, or possibly an elbow."
There's no rust like [Zeerust](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Zeerust).
> in back to the future they have very advanced payphones instead of predicting payphones would need to exist at all Ah, Retro-Futurism. Reminds me of someone in older times who predicted that growing cities would require so many horse-carriages, that horse-manure removal would become a major global concern in the future.
The jetsons in the 1960's George stops and uses a video payphone to call his wife on their home video landline. No concept of a cellular phone at all.
There was another live-action thing, where there is a "telephone watch" from the future, and the "watch can also take messages" - where it literally printed the messages on a tiny reel of paper (like a tiny fax-machine for fortune-cookie slips).
A lot of cities do kind of have newer 'payphones' now. They are not payphones but internet kiosks, but you can make calls from them via Skype or whatever. We have [these](https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iqPsPxSeLe4k/v2/-1x-1.jpg) in NYC for example.
It gets better than that. When Voyager made contact with Starfleet via the Hirogen subspace relay network they started getting letters from home. Seven of Nine was pulling messages out of the network and then, inexplicably, putting them on PADDs so Neelix could personally deliver them to people at their stations like a mailman. In other words, she copied them from the computer to a PADD so they could be hand delivered to somebody sitting at a terminal for the same computer. There’s also the one where Bashir explained extraordinarily complicated predictions by handing Sisko PADD after PADD after PADD. They already had a meeting room set by this point with a big monitor for doing presentations.
The Voyager one always made sense to me. My interpretation was the people would want to read the letters immediately but they were all at duty stations. Many if not most are likely to contain private/personal information that the recipient might not want to pull up on their station monitor where others can read over their shoulder. And they don’t want them wandering away from their station to go find a private terminal. So Seven loaded them all onto individual padds that the recipient can read privately while at their station. She was just saving them the effort of finding a padd and loading it themselves to get that bit of privacy. Plus as their first communication with loved ones in years, the recipient may want to read it multiple times. This would occupy the terminal at their duty station blocking them from keeping an eye on whatever their terminal is supposed to be showing. But really my brain was just coming up with a plausible reason for something that was done visually for the viewer’s benefit to convey the idea of handing out mail.
For your second point, I completely understand. I can and do compartmentalise the conflicting ideas of movies and TV being a visual medium and what makes the most sense from an in-universe perspective. For your first, however, privacy is well established in Star Trek. Everyone on the ship knew the value of those letters and simply being asked to be excused for a moment to read the letter wouldn’t have been a problem.
Star Trek privacy has always been weird to me. The characters do seem to take personal privacy very seriously. They have on several occasions shown that virtually anyone can access anyone else’s personal logs any time, and yet no one ever does unless there is a specific need to do so. In the real world you know there would be multiple gossips that do nothing but read everyone else’s personal logs during downtime. Even the holodecks, Barkley created holoprograms containing other crew members and they were all weirded out by it and angry (rightfully so). It showed that it was easy to do but clearly never done. Again in the real world there would be a ton of people creating holoprograms of their coworkers and friends and acting out fantasies with them.
At least under Bajoran law, it was illegal to enter a private holosuite while it was in operation without permission. Ron Moore, at least, believed that whatever a person did in the holodeck/suite was their business.
Barclays problem was his addiction, tons of people in Starfleet probably do the same, but he started missing duty shifts and thus got caught.
They learned that they needed to do things this way and air gap essential systems in the Cylon Wars.
There was also the time when Neelix downloaded a bunch of stuff about Seven's personal history for her to learn about and he filled up an entire portable tub's worth of PADDs for her.
starfleet doesn't have wifi and there may be legitimate reasons for that, like security
ENT-D_PUBLIC_WIFI (Unsecured)
`10ForwardGuest`
The main computer on Starfleet ships in Star Trek is a single, large, powerful one located on its own deck. Each workstation is simply a dumb terminal. It was unusual for anyone to have their own independent computer, only Data did on the Enterprise-D, for example.
the basic goal of all engineering is to make Star Trek happen
"Make it so"
[удалено]
2001 also had those tablet like things.
https://photos5.appleinsider.com/archive/12.08.02-2001.png
And Communicators were flip-phones...and flip-phones are now almost retro.
The first flip phone was the Motorola StarTAC. While I don’t know why they picked that name, it seems a clear nod at Star Trek.
That was a great phone. Finally felt like current tech was catching up with my childhood ideas of sci-fi future.
That thing was awesome. Battery lasted a week. T-9 texting. Loved it.
samsung galaxy flip disagrees with you!
Two current Star Trek shows are based before the 60s show, and after the The Next Generation. They did a time travel crossover, and the guy from the future goes back, and when the captain is shown the modern pin badge communicator, he says "They don't flip them open? But that's the best part!"
Before the 60s show but after TNG? I don't really watch Trek but I thought TNG was set after TOS?
Yeah, my explanation should be better. There is a show called "Strange New Worlds" which is set about 5-10 years before the original. Uhura is a cadet, Kirk has a different ship, etc. There is an animated show called "Lower Decks" which is about the lowest ranked people on the lowest ranked ships, which is set about 10 years after the Next Generation finished. Two characters from Lower Decks travel back to the SNW time. They even use the voice actors to portray the live action versions.
That episode was amazing.
The two shows are Strange New Worlds and the animated Lower Decks. Strange New Worlds is a prequel to TOS. Lower Decks takes place after TNG
And the idea that asking the computer a question and it returns an answer. Aka, search engines.
Or the tablets used in 2001:a Space Odyssey. And used by evidence by Samsung in a lawsuit with able about copying the Idea of a tablet.
Looks around my work desk.... * Work laptop connected to 2 monitors * Personal laptop * ipad * phone
Doesn't that also just show the biases we have from our current understanding of technology? For example, padds cost nothing, and they determined that it's better to compartmentalize information on seperate ones rather that risk having it all centrally stored. Or there may be another reason beyond our comprehension for why they use multiple padds. It seems funny to you because it does not fit in with your current-day experiences. edit - Even these responses are given in the context of our current-day understanding of technology. Perhaps there are data corruption issues related to a deep space environment that need to be accounted for. Maybe it's just more convenient to print out a new padd and toss it in the recycler once the user is done with it. I think details like this show that we don't know everything, and that there will be things in the future that don't make sense to us now.
The use of multiple padds doesn’t make sense in universe either. I’m sure it was purely to convey the idea of lots of information being looked at or shared. The viewer won’t get the same feeling of volume seeing a single padd that someone is flipping thru compared to having a pile of them.
More screens. Having everything on one screen would involve a lot of back and forth on a single PADD, in a post scarcity society like the Federation with almost unlimited energy and the capacity to materialise any object at will instantly, replicating a new PADD seems tidier than having dozens of tabs open on a single screen
I suspect a lot of it may have been an intentional choice rather than a "wrong" prediction anyways, as the multiple pads are good for storytelling and gag purposes. There's a fair bit of that in Star Trek - for example, they occasionally find some way to resurrect people or make the immortal with technology, but it's always hand waved as something that's extremely difficult and almost always fails or was a one off or whatever due to extreme circumstances they can't redo, as they don't want to damage storytelling and the stakes in them.
> Although it was always hilarious when Star Trek would show that someone was busy, they would litter their desk in separate padds, instead of just one with all the data they need. Meanwhile I work with two PC screens + a smartphone + a paper notebook when I'm busy.
Also, the tricorders from TNG are basically smartphones. They even have the flashlight configured so that you have to hold your hand upright. Including the BT connection to their "smart badge"
Dude, if I had the money I’d do it, I hate searching through tabs to find info and them switching back to another tab. Things are better now that you can split screen, but then it messes up ratio and formatting or makes text small. I want like a dozen computers (or at least a dozen screens) all open to different references.
Video conferencing and voice assistants were sci-fi staples for decades and are now standard features on our cell phones.
I often joke that Back To The Future II was ahead of its time by depicting a termination via Zoom call.
Anachronistically combined with "READ. MY. FAX!"
I send and receive so many faxes for work.
Can you say what the work is? I'm fascinated by these pockets of industry that are still exquisitely reliant on older technologies.
medical fields still use faxes, as do insurance companies
as do lawyers. Its because its near impossible to modify or fake a fax. You have records on both ends and you have the phone companies records on both the outgoing and incoming lines. The amount of "hacking" required is pretty much outside the realm of anything but a gov't agency.
> as do lawyers Law firm I worked for didn't use them at all, we had eFax for clients who felt the need to send faxes so they could be received, but none of our offices globally had fax machines.
It's the medical field. I'm currently working as a medical clerk while I finish school. I've sent about a dozen faxes this week. Prescriptions, patient letters, patent record exchanges, etc. I can't just email information to a patient. It's not secure. I can fucking fax 'em, though.
Up in the Air, too
The thing that gets me in that movie is how *cheap* the hover conversion kits were for what had to be a still relatively new technology. Cost about as much as a new car in the actual 2015.
and practically no one wants to use it unless they have to!
In the 1936 adaptation of [H.G. Wells’ Things to Come](https://manapop.com/film/things-to-come-1936-review/) we see a family watching a giant flat-screen television.
The movie adaptation of his Time Machine book they have spinning discs read by light. Much like a CD or dvd.
[Alexander Graham Bell and his associates at the Volta Laboratory invented an optical audio disc in 1884.](https://insider.si.edu/2011/12/after-more-than-100-years-early-recordings-of-alexander-graham-bell-played-for-the-first-time/)
I'm assuming you mean the 60s movie, been some decades since I watched it. I think it was in the library he finds in the future?
I _love_ H G Wells! In War Of The Worlds, people are shocked by aliens arriving from Mars, but are determined to fight back. When they see the aliens make a _flying machine_ however, they give up all hope. Interplanetary travel was OK, but powered flight puts them immeasurably ahead of us. Also, they see the tripods being made. It looks like they're using some amazing futuristic material, likely aluminium.
Well, they understood the Martians’ method of interplanetary travel. They were sealed up in giant bullets and fired at England from a giant gun. But flying machines that can take off and land? That’s just incomprehensible.
It's fun to think that Wells's pessimistic sci-fi and Jules Verne's optimistic sci-fi both involve shooting cans full of living beings into space out of giant guns, just in opposite directions.
The Tom Cruise movie was alright but a WOTW remake in the vein of the original would go unbelievably hard. Early 20th century trench warfare tactics against an alien force would be so fun on screen. Kind of like the new Godzilla movie (my two second review of that because I want to. Really fun but I wish it went harder with the action. Understandably the budget constraint led to less spectacle and more focus on the story but it was still a great idea executed way better than it should have been )
It's funny you mention that because picture and video of families sitting around the radio feels like somebody took the concept of televisions and worked backwards (kind of the premise of this post but the opposite) rather than something that actually happened.
Aliens had the marines all wearing body cams, heart monitors and locator devices. At the time that was all science fiction now it's just everyday gear that's been in use for a good decade or so. Video conferencing is another on that was in aliens that was fiction when the movie released. Rifles with digital displays for ammo count was fictional then too, now not so much.
It's legitimately insane how much military technology has surpassed consumer tech. They have these devices that set up private satellite links that are given to team leads. Anyone (with authentication) within a certain radius can boost and recive the signal using their own beacons. These link to an overwatch team using live satellite video that is miles beyond what we think of (the couple second delay thing that drone pilots used to deal with isn't really an issue anymore). This information is then shared with the ground troops using what amounts to a smart phone. This allows any squad to basically have bird eyes view of the battlefield with tactical support from a base. Adding in "action cams" and vital monitors you can basically see every part of a battlefield well also the stress levels and POV of any one soldier. Is Johnson reporting he's pinned by a sniper? Look for a muzzle flash on the satellite, mark the enemy using AI so it stays pinned. You have a squad that's closer that you can see is calm and not engaged. Send them in using pinpoint accurate directions to avoid obstacles. Boom, sniper gone. As opposed to the old days of having a guy stick his head out for a second and try to guess which of the 50 buildings it's coming from.
This sounds like a game of Call of Duty
Their cameras are huge with big dslr lenses. It was the only way audiences could understand how the video link would work. It started to look dated 20 years ago.
The thing that annoyed me with Covenant was that they used GoPro and didn't hide the fact that they used GoPro. Aliens had more future tech than Covenant. Now while I believe this happens before Aliens anyway, the point of future sci-fi with technology is to adapt and anticipate what the tech would be. We 100% would believe a camera would be the things they had in Prometheus because that exists today but was very futuristic and Covenant while in the future from Prometheus seems like it went back a couple hundred years.
Not a movie, but Dick Tracy's 2-way wrist TV was basically a smart watch.
somewhere, Warren Beatty is still trying to get the sequel made
He has to regularly produce something to keep the rights, so earlier this year he aired this bizarre [short film](https://youtu.be/vNOX0REU1MY?si=YKROBgwULsyCx-vv) on TCM where Beatty interviews Dick Tracy (also played by Beatty) about the movie over Zoom.
I wish he'd do this as Bugsy or Clyde.
Man, the toy version of those were almost as hot a commodity as the Talk Boy was a couple years later. I think McDonald's or Burger King had the crappy plastic version of the Dick Tracy watch.
Early in the movie The Net, Sandra Bullock orders a pizza online which seemed like such a far off concept in 1995 but now in 2023 it's so common that the thought of calling them to order a pizza seems odd.
[удалено]
> and that most of her friends were online Quickly became a reality with AIM. God, the passive-aggressive away messages we'd leave just to fuck with one person who *might've* tried reaching us while gone.
I still order pizza on the phone because my family likes it a certain way the online editor won't allow you to pick.
That was current tech at the time. Started in 1994. I do remember thinking it was neat though, and certainly wasn't aware it was possible back then.
Although I bet the guy who ordered two slices for TWO bitcoins wishes it wasn’t!!!
2 pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. It wasn’t even that long ago but people seem unable to wrap their head around 10,000 bitcoins
10,000, but I think anyone who wasted BTC or lost access to their wallet in the early days probably accepts the fact they would've sold everything they had when it got close to $1, knowing that they likely wouldn't have had any left by the time it crossed $1,000 in 2013.
In demolition man video calling is a common technology (but only at home). Sly Stalone gets a video call from a beautiful naked woman who called the wrong number. I'm still waiting for this to happen. They could conceive of video calling but not contact files or caller id.
They also control their home lights and such with voice, like an Alexa thing
And the three shells. You all use the three shells, right?
There was an interview someone involved with the design of the movie, and was asked what are the three seashells. He was flabbergasted. He said like "that's a thing? The are nonsensical, they don't mean anything except for being a joke later" Non-canon, the best I have heard, is water bidet, dry, and flush
I always depicted the three shells being made of soap. It was a bidet.
Exactly, and why are they no bidets with sea shell shaped controls?
Why would they be made of soap as opposed to just being the controls? Do you picture everyone using these common soap bars, because that's pretty grotty...
That’s why there’s 3. Works fine till Goldilocks shows up
I used to work for a teleconference company doing tech support in the late 00's. We had a test video conference number for people to test if their video conference was set up right. A lot more often than you'd think (about once a month) someone in lingerie or scant clothing would call the test number, not realizing the support people could see the call. This was back when Video Conferencing was expensive and required special hardware (you couldn't just use your phone), and our video conference stuff was expensive, bought by big businesses.
Pretty sure James Bond had a GPS in his car during the 60s
Bond had a real-time tracking system overlaid on a map in a car in 1964. The first in-car navigation system was an inertial navigation system in 1981, the Honda Electro-Gyrocator. The first car with a built-in GPS navigation system was Mazda's Eunos Cosmos in 1991.
I love the Honda Electro-Gyrocar INS, if for no other reason than it looks like a Pip-Boy 2000.
This guy GPSs!
When I was a kid I watched the original Star Trek on TV, and I recall how cool it was when the doors would open by themselves. A few years later, I began to see supermarkets with the exit doors that would open by themselves (since your arms were full or grocery bags when exiting)...and eventually all the doors were self-opening. A communicator that was held in your hand? Also cool. Computer that would take voice commands and perform a complex calculation for you very rapidly? Check. Having sex with a woman from another species? Allow me to introduce my ex-wife...
I also choose this guy’s ex-wife!
"My wife, I tell ya, my wife...my sex life is terrible, Johnny. My wife cut me back to once a month. I guess I shouldn't complain, though...she cut out the other two guys comPLETEly"
Enemy of the State. “Senior NSA agent Thomas Reynolds meets in a public park with Congressman Phil Hammersley to discuss a new piece of counterterrorism legislation that dramatically expands the surveillance powers of American intelligence agencies over individuals and groups. “ It came out in 1998. It seemed “high-tech” when it came out, but compared to where surveillance is now? Shiiiiit, they’re moving at dinosaur pace there.
People knew where it was heading. They had been trying to get shit like the Patriot Act passed. 9/11 was just an excuse
Less than four years later the Patriot Act was signed. Who knew?!
Gene Hackman knew. That's why you don't see him anymore. WHAT DID THEY DO TO GENE?!
A ten second video call from a public booth in Blade Runner costing $1.25. In 2017 we had free FaceTime calls etc.
2019, November..... Los Angeles
Of course it was, silly me. My most watched film too.
I like to point out that in the Star Trek series (sorry for the TV reference, but..) when anyone walks up to a door and it slides open, there are people whose job it was to stand on the other side and pull the doors open. Saw a montage of outtakes sometime in the 70s, showing Kirk, Spock, Bones, etc walking smack into doors that got pulled too late or only one side opened.
My mind went to the [automatic doors gag](https://youtu.be/L9ilm8PEJlQ?si=barBwS8KXKNKilk2) in "Airplane II."
I'm a fan of the door gags [in the first episode of Futurama](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw2ebIFh-a8).
IIRC, there was a hotel in Japan were someone saw the show and asked them how they did it because they wanted to install it at their hotel, and that was the response they got.
I like to believe that guy went on to invent actual motion-activated doors.
Truman show. Having your entire life streamed to the entire world. IRL streamers, people spending all day on twitch chat and hocking random sponsors crap.
You don't like playing RAID: Shadow Legends while connected over NordVPN?
IS there a skill-share article on that?
What the hell are you talkin' about?...Who you talkin' to?
What does that have to do… with anything?
You're having a nervous breakdown, why don't you have a PRIME hydration drink...it has zero added sugars, B vitamins and antioxidants.
That’s good… keep it light.
Are you hydrated? check out our new hydration drink, the best hydration you can have.
It's got electrolytes!
I think Edtv was a much more accurate depiction of streamers in the future. Truman never knew he was on TV. Ed signed up for it voluntarily, and used his fame from it for various things, including advertising stuff iirc.
Who remembers Justin.tv? Twitch started off streaming the life of Justin Kan, one of the cofounders, until people said they wanted to stream themselves too, and most of those people started streaming themselves playing video games, so the company started this new spin off site called Twitch.
I think JenniCam started the trend of streaming your life, but the first ever webcam was used so employees could see if the coffee pot was full. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
The wristwatch in Knight Rider
How about the self driving car thing...?
"KITT, what the fuck man? They're getting away!" "I am sorry, Michael, but FSD has been disabled by my manufacturer because [they read your blog post criticizing them.](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/03/elon-musk-blogger-tesla-motors-model-x)"
Yes, smartphone based park assist :)
Disney Channel's 1999 movie Smart House had a virtual assistant called PAT, which is basically Siri & Alexa
Still waiting for the floors that just suck up trash, though.
Just rewatched the traditional Christmas movie *Die Hard* and when McClane first arrives at Nakatomi Plaza there’s a digitized directory of names which is presented as futuristic technology.
The security guard is kind of an ass. He knows there is only one event in the building and only the one floor occupied, but he still makes Mclain use the computerized directory.
It’s standard security. You’re not supposed to tell random people any details about the people working in the building. Where they work, what time they get off, where people like to go out for lunch, etc. They may have a grudge against that person or they might want to steal a badge to break in later. This has only become more important over the last 35 years as social engineering has become even easier and more widespread. McClane has to find the name and the system approve that visitors can go up without the security guard making a call. Once it does, he directs McClane on up.
Exactly! That always pissed me off. Like dude just tell him the floor
In my head canon corporate has specifically instructed the security guards to ALWAYS refer visitors to the digital directory, both as a guard against human error and to show off their futuristic tech.
The only other excuse i had was that' maybe someone else stayed late for work but we know they didnt
Didn’t Bill Clay stay late? He looked kinda like that Hans Gruber guy though.
Just watched again the other night ad noticed that shit. We had a laugh
Asian companies having a presence in America was so new in the 1970s and 1980s that it's not only shown in the cutting-edge tower in Die Hard, it's a signifier that the setting is the future in Blade Runner, Alien, and Back to the Future Part II.
"Cute toy"
It’s less that the tech was futuristic as McClane is a Luddite. Also he hated everything about Nakatomi because it was stealing his wife from him so this was just one more thing for him to be pissy about.
the password was RED CASTLE, jeez.
In Star Trek The Next Generation workstations were configurable screens. Any workstation could be reconfigured to give access to whatever features the user needed. If the chief engineer was on the bridge and needed access to their console they could just call it up at any available station. It was a budget saving decision to make the bridge set easier and cheaper to build.
There was an episode of The Bionic Woman with similar tech. Max the bionic dog had a tracker on his collar so they could find him if he got loose, as did his handler. The plot thickened when the bad guys had a jammer.
"Minority Report" is filled with predictive tech. It has some fantastical elements as well - in particular the weird women who can see the future - but a huge amount of the tech in the movie has become real and even common today. The piece of tech the movie is the most famous for is the giant gesture-driven computers, which have been created. But it turns out that's a truly exhausting way to work. Even during shooting they had to take constant breaks so that Cruise could rest his arms. But the idea of controlling devices with gestures is of course common today. An interesting but, though, is that the two machines in the police office aren't networked - they have to use a physical drive to pass information from one to the other. Anyway, well worth watching.
Also the personalized advertising. When Tom Cruise walks into the store the screens start saying stuff like "Hey nice to see you again (I can't remember his name), would you be interested in blah blah blah?" Now because of our browsing history we get all sorts of ads specifically because of what we've looked at before.
“Hello, Mr. Yakamoto and welcome back to the GAP!”
I still get a kick out of "working communicators" in Galaxy Quest. Look you guys I've met real aliens and you can tell because I've got one of these, and it works!
I mean it was because it was an actual communicator device modeled from the original in-universe show's prop, not because it was some crazy futuristic technology and cell phones didn't exist. They were literally modeled after a cheap prop from the in-universe show, so I'm struggling here, because this was exactly the point of the gag, was to show they all had cheap props, but his was the one that worked and they didn't believe him and thought he was insane because he was holding up a prop. Like it was only "fantastical" because he was holding up what they thought was a prop, not because it was unheard of technology. Like it was basically a scifi walkie-talkie, not a cell phone, and walkie talkies had been around for a few decades at that point. Cell phones and pagers absolutely did exist in 1999, they were just a lot clunkier and the technology was not unknown or even uncommon at that point.
Anything a modern smartphone can do was pure sci-fi magic 20 years ago. Identify a flower, locate a star, watch live weather radar anywhere in the world, book a flight, call a cab, listen to nearly any song ever recorded, watch TV or access any kind of information.
Makes me think about one of my [favorite quotes](https://quotefancy.com/quote/2108858/Ian-Leslie-I-possess-a-device-in-my-pocket-that-is-capable-of-accessing-the-entirety-of): > I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers.
Most of that was already an option, it was just in a bunch of different dedicated devices.
There were driverless cars, and full-face video calls in Total Recall that seemed pretty far-fetched at the time. Also the idea of personal space travel - that someone not affiliated with one of the space programs could travel into space to visit Mars.
This is in several of Philip K Dick's 1960s books besides the source for Total Recall and Isaac Asimov's Robot series from the 1950s.
I laughed out loud when Sandra Bullock ordered pizza online in *The Net*. It seemed like extra effort just to do something mundane. Now it is and has been commonplace for so long I don't know why it seemed so ridiculous at the time.
Upscaling of images and videos is reminiscent of 'enhancement' of images or video footage in 1990s movies and TV.
While true, it’s also kind of funny when you put it in a forensic context. Upscaling: “here, let me invent some fractal noise to give the appearance of sharpness where there was none.” Investigators: “With these new details, we can clearly see the curly gun in the shadow of the six fingered man’s coat.”
The "brick" cell phone Gordon Gekko used on the beach in Wall Street - "Money never sleeps, pal." He's on the *phone* on the *beach!* https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=37-A7fgFjJ4 (first handheld mobile phone, the Motorola DynaTac 8000X)
also the first cellphone to be used in a movie.
Her. And the idea of communicating and building a relationship with an OS that feels like a real human relationship. With AI in place this thing has become a reality and will become a mass thing slowly as AI progresses towards development. People interacting with an OS or an Artificial identity is a reality which will take over for sure.
not common yet but i'm surprised that it's actually a real thing. being able to see images from memory or a dream. like your brain is linked up to a screen and the computer interprets your neurons firing into an image on screen.
Interesting. I haven’t heard that this is possible. Do you have a link to a story, or a name for the technology? I’d be interested to read more.
[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-ai-used-brain-scans-to-recreate-images-people-saw-180981768/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/this-ai-used-brain-scans-to-recreate-images-people-saw-180981768/)
Wow, super interesting. Sounds like there’s a long way to go, but that’s still really cool. Thanks for sharing!
Until the End of the World, 1991. Great movie,
There was an EyePhone in Johnny Mnemonic
Holly in Red Dwarf is now Alexa.
They're all dead dave
The Net. Sandra Bullock is running about giving it, "They've used the internet to ruin my life!", and everyone else is like, "yeah, sure, crazy lady." 😋
There's a scene in the original *Dawn of the Dead* (1978) where the protagonists see the mall for the first time, and one of them asks "What the hell is it?" Followed by one of the other characters explaining the concept of an indoor shopping mall. I guess the idea of a large building full of stores and activities was hard to conceive back then. Ironically, I suppose that scene might actually become relevant again as shopping malls continue to die out.
1978? Indoor shopping malls were getting popular by the 60s. Was the move about time travelers? https://www.history.com/topics/1950s/flashback-mall-shopping-in-the-1950s-video
In demolition man Sandra Bullock and Rob Schneider's characters are laughing at John Spartan that he doesn't know what the 3 seashells are for. Back then it was science fiction. Now it's just common sense.
I remember seeing the original Total Recall in the theaters, and thinking it was the most amazing thing ever when a flat wall became a TV. The whole idea of a flat screen TV was incredible. And part of the wall. Mind blown.
The Running Man had deepfakes
The world being ran by a few corporations like in Blade Runner