Minority Report future

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As I continue my tradition of looking at futuristic movies and see what did or did not come true, we move on to look at Minority Report. This one is chock full of conspiracy goodness, including police tracking and corporate lies. Life imitates art in a film that arrests people who have technically haven’t committed any crimes, and in a future where you can’t even ride the subway without being tracked. Unfortunately, things like this happen in our current reality, along with many other technological and societal advances that became true.

The 2002 film directed by Stephen Spielberg called Minority Report not only had a plot that dealt with predicting the future, but also had real-life future predictions within the movie itself. Taking place in 2054, the director explained on the bonus DVD material bundled with the movie that he used consultants to paint a realistic outlooks of what the future may actually bring. In this article, we will look at some of the ways where these prospective forecasts have already became true.

Personalized Advertising and Behavioral Retargeting

targeted advertising

Something apparent in the film is that advertising directs the consumer directly based on past purchases. When the main character John Anderton goes into The Gap, a computerized screen asks him about the tank tops he purchased. This is similar to how digital footprints in the internet allow for behavioral retargeting, a system used to present ads based on a person’s interests. Although internet ads may not be as blunt as to present advertisements with your name, they still find the opportunity to know the kind of person you are and to make the ad personalized for you and your interests.

This one’s a doozy. Nowadays, you can’t so much as check the weather without being bombarded with web banners blocking your vision from the top, bottom and sides. Don’t forget about pop-up videos, an unwelcome headache that sucks your bandwidth into oblivion and makes sure that your mobile data plan runs out before you can even check your e-mail. Heaven forbid that you click on one of these ads by accident while intending to close them by pressing the tiny “x” with the tip of your pinky. If you do, your behavior begins to be tracked and sold to marketers to no end, and now that annoying advertisement with a puppy that you tried to close now becomes the basis of all ads, which now assume that you own a dog and have a fetish for puppy chow.

Self-Driving Cars That Don’t Crash

selfdriving cars minority report

Spielberg in Minority Report made a wise decision by avoiding future predictions of flying cars, like in Blade Runner or The Fifth Element, and instead opted for self-driving cars like in Demolition Man. In the movie, individual vehicles follow a track that sometimes moves in bizarre directions like upward or downward. Although this is not the case now, we do currently have the technology where cars are able to drive themselves without a driver having to provide all of its movements. Although currently controversial for several reasons including reliability and security, this is certainly an accurate forecast for what has been waiting in the years ahead since the movie was released.

The funny this is, at the time this is being written, is that nobody truly trusts self-driving cars. As the cause of countless car accidents and even deaths, it’s not surprising why they have become banned in some areas. People have tried sleeping behind the wheel after a long day of work, only to find themselves ticketed, their vehicle impounded, or the most embarrassing of them all, smashed into a cop car that was parked on the side of the road. People on bikes and motorcycles have been killed, which seems to show that self-driving cars can’t see things well that aren’t other cars such as people or, ya know, living things with a soul.

3D Video That Looks Convincing

minority report 3d video

This one is a bit tricky, since 3D has been something experimented with for a long time. In Minority Report, Anderton watches his home movies on a projector where the characters seemingly pop out of the screen, establishing a background and a foreground. In 2011, Nintendo released their portable console called The Nintendo 3DS which allowed for a stereoscopic 3D image without the need of separate glasses or accessories. During the time period when this was released, games like Killzone 3 for the PlayStation 3 console were heavily marketed along side 3D televisions and aligned with many movies in theaters using the new technology as well. Although the movie trend continues on a limited level, the fad fizzled out and caused financial catastrophe for electronic stores like Best Buy who heavily invested in selling the special televisions.

I suppose the current alternative is stereoscopic phone usage, where the phone is glued to your face with a worthless piece of plastic (or cardboard) holding it to your eyeballs while showing two separate images, giving the illusion of 3D. This seems pretty futuristic and sophisticated, until you find out that it was invented way back in 1838 and called a Stereoscope. It was even seen in the movie The Blue Lagoon, for those naysayers who don’t believe me.

Tracking People in Public Locations

public transportation tracking

Freedom isn’t free anymore, that’s for sure. Anderton in this flick uses public transportation and has his eyes scanned, allowing police to track him down and find him. Although public retinal scanning has not become a reality, facial recognition has. The technology mostly uses the images of eyes and eyebrows of individuals in high-definition cameras in order to find particular people.

Facial recognition has always been kind of iffy, not being entirely reliable from video or surveillance cameras. Even with high definition, a crowd of people with faces at different angles and lighting are hard to distinguish. However, it is widely used with photographs of passport pictures and driver license photos, showing that publicly tracking individuals is a reality.

Video Calls From Your Annoying Boss

The idea of being able to expand an audio phone call to also include a live video has been an obvious idea and cliche for so long that it hardily counts at a future prediction. Nowadays, using FaceTime, WhatsApp, Zoom, Skype, and others have become standard. Other movies have also long predicted so-called “video calls”, including Blade Runner and The Island. Although various video-call devices had been developed over the decades, it wasn’t until the advent of the internet where it became a house-hold commonality.

No movie, however, matched the realism of video calls as the original Blade Runner movie. Filmed at a time when payphones still existed, Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) makes a phone call in a bar with a video screen that looks and feels totally believable. It’s bulky and looks like crap, complete with graffiti and muffled audio. Rachel, played by Sean Young, enters the frame with bad lighting, which is exactly what would be expected from a spontaneous video call. Compare this to the video call booth in The Island (with obvious MSN product placement) where everything looks perfectly spick-and-span.

Voice Commands For Your Home

Another common guess is the invent of voice commands to turn on or off items such as lamps. The main character in Minority Report says “lights” when he enters his apartment, which is similar to what happens in other futuristic movies. This is similar to modern devices like The Echo, an Amazon device where you ask Alexa to do various things, including controlling appliances. It involves using a “smart assistant”, similar to “Siri” from Apple and “Cortana” from Microsoft. All of these products, however, require a precursor of saying a word or name before saying the command you want to say. So just saying “lights” doesn’t seem like something that will ever happen, but nonetheless, voice commands are here to stay. It’s too bad that you have to sync them with additional plugs, doorbells, speakers, and other endless amounts of crap for this privilege of “convenience”.

Minority Report failed to predict that commands wouldn’t be heard properly, and the so-called “smart assistant” would play the wrong song, or asks you to repeat the command. This often results in frustration and cursing, something that an over-priced and privacy-invading robot speaker deserves for not bending to your will. It’s embarrassing when The Clapper, sold in the 80s, works a lot better and simpler than the complicated voice-controlled garbage we have now that requires a subscription or dedicated server connected to the internet, a privacy disclosure, and selling a piece of your soul.

Overall

In the movie Minority Report, the futuristic world of 2054 is brought to life with a blend of advanced technology and ethical dilemmas. From the concept of Precrime and the use of precogs to predict and prevent murders, to the high-tech surveillance systems like eye-scanners and spiders, the film explores the thin line between justice and personal freedom. As Tom Cruise’s character, Anderton, navigates through a web of conspiracy and fate, the movie raises important questions about the role of technology in our lives. Directed by Steven Spielberg and based on Philip K. Dick’s story, Minority Report remains a thrilling sci-fi action film that challenges our perceptions of choice, ethics, and the future of technology.