chameleon breadline: Minority Report at 10: a look at technology from today to 2054

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Minority Report at 10: a look at technology from today to 2054

Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, based on the Philip K. Dick short story, opened in North American theaters 10 years ago today. It was preceded by the director's A.I. a year earlier, which was famously a pet project of Stanley Kubrick's for decades prior, and was followed up by Spielberg's version of War of the Worlds a couple of years later. Together, they formed an unofficial trilogy of sorts that represented a turn to darker science fiction for a director noted for his more optimistic excursions into the genre. Of the three, Minority Report was the best-received out of the gate, both as a film and as a detailed vision of the near-future unlike any since Blade Runner.

That reputation has largely held up in the decade since (while A.I.'s has grown quite a bit), during which time it's also become a sort of technological touchstone. For all its bleakness, the future of Minority Report was one that we could recognize, and one that we were reaching towards -- at least when it came to the technology. Human-computer interaction would be more natural than ever, advertising would be everywhere and more personalized, and smart cars would deliver us to our smart homes. Today, it's almost as common for a new technology to be described as Minority Report-like as it is to be described as Star Trek-like. That was hardly just the result of good luck.