From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Wed Jun 26 2002 - 14:30:05 MDT
Steven Spielberg's new movie Minority Report, based on the Philip
K. Dick short story, opened last weekend. It starts Tom Cruise as
John Anderton, who runs the Precrime unit in Washington, D.C. in the
year 2054. Precrime uses predictions of future murders by 3 "precogs",
genetically engineered beings who can see the future, to arrest murderers
before they commit the crime. The movie gets going when Anderton himself
is predicted to commit a murder in 72 hours - and the victim is someone
he has never heard of.
I won't say more about the plot; the description above is basically what
you get from the ads and trailers. I thought it was a great film, with
a unique visual "look", exciting special effects, and surprising plot
twists, much more appealing than Spielberg's previous sci fi movie, A.I.
But mostly I want to talk about his future world; how convincing is it?
How does it compare with our own views of the future?
For me, the big problem with the plot in terms of believability was the
existence of the precogs. Not only are their psychic powers implausible,
but they inherently involve paradoxes when people take actions based on
the precogs' glimpses of the future (arresting murderers so that predicted
murders don't happen, for example). However you wouldn't have a movie
without them, so we have to suspend disbelief in this one plot element.
And after all, every time-travel movie should have a good hard paradox
at its core!
Beyond that, Spielberg's world of 2054 is visually exciting and has
some plausible elements. Newspapers, signs, even cereal boxes are all
based on electronic ink and display animated images. Walking in public
you are assaulted from all directions by advertising signs displaying
video images. People get their identities scanned as they walk around
(via remote sensing of retinal patterns) and are greeted by name by the
ads: "John Anderton, wouldn't a nice cold Michelob taste good right now?"
Anderton uses a gesture recognition system to interface to the computer
system at the Precrime headquarters. Giant screens abound for video
display, and there are even 3-D display systems.
Transportation shows some of the biggest changes. Cars are replaced by
maglev vehicles that drive themselves, at least on the highway system,
which appears to be fully computerized. The police travel in jet-powered
flying vehicles and some units even wear portable jet-packs. The maglev
highways are capable of going straight up the sides of buildings.
The overall effect is a very recognizable world that's been turned up
a notch with these futuristic elements. But overall I did not find it
a very convincing view of 50 years in the future.
First, obviously there is no Singularity, and none in sight. There is
no sign of any destabilizing technology (other than the precogs): no
nanotech, not much visible biotech, no AI. The lack of progress in
computers was the biggest failing. Anderton uses a gesture recognition
system, but he has to wear special gloves! Come on, they have gesture
recognition today if you wear gloves. You're not going to still need
that 50 years from now. Computers are also able to dim the lights on
voice command. Again, this can be done today.
Driving the cars is a more advanced application, but it appeared that it
only worked on the automated highway. When Anderton drove to a country
home I think he was driving the vehicle manually. We could probably
make self-driving cars today if we had the freedom to design the highway
system from scratch and put all the cars under automated control.
So there is no way we are seeing 50 years of progress on the computer
front in this movie. Even taking a pessimistic view of progress towards
human equivalence, AI should be everywhere, avatars that you can converse
with in at least restricted domains. Expert systems should help with
almost every kind of work. Anderton's analysis efforts were almost
completely manual.
As far as biotech, they do show advances in medical transplant technology,
and some fancy engineered plants. And apparently the precogs have some
therapeutic engineering to improve their functionality. There's not
much else, although the story didn't particularly offer opportunities
to show other applications.
In terms of materials science, the main futuristic element was the
construction of the highway system and some tall buildings. I don't
quite see how or why you would have a highway running along the top of a
building, as the movie seemed to show at one point. Strangely, I found
myself skeptical that this much change could occur in "only" 50 years,
absent nanotech. Looking at the tremendous difficulties that large-scale
construction projects seem to have encountered in recent decades, it's
hard to believe that D.C. could build this futuristic highway system.
The cop's jet copters might be possible, but the personal jetpacks
were pretty unbelievable. There are a lot of issues in terms of center
of gravity and torque that have to be addressed for jetpacks to work.
The scenes with the cops flying around were amusing but even as sci-fi
they were not visually convincing to me.
Overall I thought the movie pandered a little too much to popular
preconceptions about "the future". Roadways in the sky, personal
jetpacks, flying vehicles; people expect these but they don't fit that
well into the overall milieu, which was in other respects more like
15-25 years in the future rather than 50. If they had left that out
and left in the identification technology and talking, personalized
ads, tuned up the AI a bit, and set the whole thing in 2025 I would
have found it more believable as a look at the future.
Hal
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