6 ms·

The surprising accuracy of Minority Report 10 years later

72 points by cdp 15y ago

veb 15y ago
Warning: Once you start reading, your productivity will go out the window. Awesome article.
pkarbe 15y ago
Interesting aside: The UI shown in Minority Report was actually developed by a team at MIT: http://goo.gl/tRLXO http://goo.gl/tRLXO
- ThomPete 15y ago
  Casey Reas and Ben Fry, the two guys behind Processing.org
juiceandjuice 15y ago
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 :)
gr366 15y ago
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 15y ago
  Some inventions can't be improved?
  - evo_9 15y ago
    http://www.nubrella.com/ http://www.nubrella.com/
    - hugh3 15y ago
      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 15y ago
        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.
    - pablasso 15y ago
      I'd rather get wet than look stupid wearing that.
  - bricestacey 15y ago
- hugh3 15y ago
  Umbrellas have been in use for thousands of years. Until we get head-mounted lasers that vapourise every incoming raindrop (probably not a great idea in itself) we're pretty much stuck with 'em.
  - danssig 15y ago
    Or you could wear waterproof clothing. Where I am in Europe I don't see too many umbrellas. They have a saying here: "There is no bad weather, just bad clothing".
    - JulianMorrison 15y ago
      I have yet to see waterproof clothing that fulfils 2 criteria which umbrellas easily do: - Your face and hands don't get wet, even when the rain is blowing sideways. (Coat-only waterproofing also leaves you with wet jeans and shoes.) - You don't get basically just as wet anyhow on account of sweat being trapped inside the clothes. (Even "breathable" stuff traps sweat when its outside is slick with water.)
- diN0bot 15y ago
  lots of materials innovation has made wearing water proof jackets, pants and shoes way more awesome than the smelly, hot, unbreathing linseed oil covered cloaks of a hundred years ago.
- Joakal 15y ago
  In the near future, Umbrellas can probably absorb light so well due to no reflection, that it offers warmth from the cold rain. That's from the top of my head.
Tiktaalik 15y ago
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&topic=&topic_set= http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.06/spielberg.html?pg=1...
hasenj 15y ago
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 :/
- acangiano 15y ago
  > Automated cars that can be remotely controlled by the government Google automated cars + OnStar-Law Enforcement partnership. > - Eye-based identification everywhere Google already uses it in their datacenters. It's hard to say if it will catch on, but it's not unreasonable to expect its widespread use in, say, 2030/2040.
  - ig1 15y ago
    The reason that it hasn't taken off isn't due to technical reasons, we've had the technology for some time. Human's just aren't comfortable using it.
- pyre 15y ago
  The technology was specifically meant to look like what could be possible ~50 years from its release.
- BrandonM 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyKey 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.
DannoHung 15y ago
Was anyone else seriously pissed that the Spielberg version missed the entire point of the Dick story?
- hugh3 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    My understanding was that the device did work there was just a human element to the interpretation.
    - Stormbringer 15y ago
      Exactly. The difference between seeing something and comprehending it.
    - nemeth 15y ago
      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).
abecedarius 15y ago
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.)
aneth 15y ago
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.
jared314 15y ago
I think the article has it backwards. The movie used technology that was being developed and took it to a logical conclusion.
gallerytungsten 15y ago
What's really sad about that article is the failure to mention the origin of the ideas: Philip K. Dick.
- warwick 15y ago
  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.
phamilton 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      Watch this presentation to get an overview of how we can learn from sci-fi interfaces : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMIyO8F0jxg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMIyO8F0jxg
dhughes 15y ago
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.
rms 15y ago
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 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 15y ago
  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).
- rms 15y ago
  (actually I meant Terry Gilliam, not Terry Pratchett)
ladon86 15y ago
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?

72 points by cdp 15y ago

veb 15y ago

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

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

ThomPete 15y ago
Casey Reas and Ben Fry, the two guys behind Processing.org

juiceandjuice 15y ago

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 :)

gr366 15y ago

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 15y ago
Some inventions can't be improved?
- evo_9 15y ago
  http://www.nubrella.com/ http://www.nubrella.com/
  - hugh3 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      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.
  - pablasso 15y ago
    I'd rather get wet than look stupid wearing that.
- bricestacey 15y ago
hugh3 15y ago
Umbrellas have been in use for thousands of years. Until we get head-mounted lasers that vapourise every incoming raindrop (probably not a great idea in itself) we're pretty much stuck with 'em.
- danssig 15y ago
  Or you could wear waterproof clothing. Where I am in Europe I don't see too many umbrellas. They have a saying here: "There is no bad weather, just bad clothing".
  - JulianMorrison 15y ago
    I have yet to see waterproof clothing that fulfils 2 criteria which umbrellas easily do: - Your face and hands don't get wet, even when the rain is blowing sideways. (Coat-only waterproofing also leaves you with wet jeans and shoes.) - You don't get basically just as wet anyhow on account of sweat being trapped inside the clothes. (Even "breathable" stuff traps sweat when its outside is slick with water.)
diN0bot 15y ago
lots of materials innovation has made wearing water proof jackets, pants and shoes way more awesome than the smelly, hot, unbreathing linseed oil covered cloaks of a hundred years ago.
Joakal 15y ago
In the near future, Umbrellas can probably absorb light so well due to no reflection, that it offers warmth from the cold rain. That's from the top of my head.

Tiktaalik 15y ago

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

hasenj 15y ago

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 :/

acangiano 15y ago
> Automated cars that can be remotely controlled by the government Google automated cars + OnStar-Law Enforcement partnership. > - Eye-based identification everywhere Google already uses it in their datacenters. It's hard to say if it will catch on, but it's not unreasonable to expect its widespread use in, say, 2030/2040.
- ig1 15y ago
  The reason that it hasn't taken off isn't due to technical reasons, we've had the technology for some time. Human's just aren't comfortable using it.
pyre 15y ago
The technology was specifically meant to look like what could be possible ~50 years from its release.
BrandonM 15y ago
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 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyKey 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.

DannoHung 15y ago

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

hugh3 15y ago
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 15y ago
  My understanding was that the device did work there was just a human element to the interpretation.
  - Stormbringer 15y ago
    Exactly. The difference between seeing something and comprehending it.
  - nemeth 15y ago
    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).

abecedarius 15y ago

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.)

aneth 15y ago

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.

jared314 15y ago

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

gallerytungsten 15y ago

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

warwick 15y ago
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.

phamilton 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    Watch this presentation to get an overview of how we can learn from sci-fi interfaces : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMIyO8F0jxg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMIyO8F0jxg

dhughes 15y ago

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.

rms 15y ago

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 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 15y ago
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).
rms 15y ago
(actually I meant Terry Gilliam, not Terry Pratchett)

ladon86 15y ago

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?