When making the 2002 film Minority Report, about a policing system in the future Washington,
DC, that use psychics to stop murders before they happen, Stephen Spielberg
famously invited a group of experts to speculate on what the United States
would look like in 2054, technologically speaking.
Certainly, the gesture-controlled screens used by Chief of
PreCrime John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) were right on the money, even
though the witnesses to Anderton’s swiping skills seem a little too impressed,
considering the technology would have been around for more than 40 years by
then. It’s like today being agog by someone’s effective microwave use.
I love the movie and rank it up there with Spielberg’s best
and most philosophical. But with the hindsight (or foresight?) we have in 2015,
it’s clear that many of the movie’s guesses are a little off.
- Where is the geopositioning technology? PreCrime gets the names of victims and potential killers, and the time of the crime, which is very convenient. So most of its work is finding and getting to the location of the future crime. The widespread use of geopositioning in smart phones, coupled with the increasing use of drones, means that, by 2054, finding someone might be the easiest part of any criminal investigation. In Minority Report’s opening scene, the investigators work their asses off to figure out which Howard Marks is about to kill his wife and her lover. Even in 2015, they could have used Facebook to quickly find which Howard Marks was married, where he lived, whether he hung out and which had signs of unhappiness in his life. Getting to the crime? Gotta love jet packs. Waiting for them to be sold at Canadian Tire.

- Much has been made of Minority Report’s depiction of personalized advertising, where ads call out the names of consumers from digital billboards. Again, smartphones have changed the course of marketing. Marketers don’t shout at us in public now and they likely won’t in the future. Instead, they whisper to us with flashes and beeps and vibrations from our phones, fitbits and maybe our watches or glasses. And the messaging will likely be much less hamfisted than a GAP hologram calling out, “Hello, Mr. Yakamoto, welcome back to the GAP! How did those assorted tanktops work out for you?” Through social media and other relationship-building interaction, retailers will likely know exactly how things worked out before a consumer returns to the store again.
- The GAP in 2054? Try H&M.
- Cars won’t have steering wheels. When pods are travelling along tracks, the most unsafe thing is to give somebody the sense they can control it, as we’ve already learned from Google’s Self-Driving Car project. Spielberg obviously thought things out and figured that cars would drive themselves on special roadways in high-traffic areas, but would be handled in an old-fashioned way in more rural areas. Again, geopositioning technology made such a two-pronged approach unnecessary.

- Moving pieces of plastic around to put images on screens. The transparent-hologramy plastic discs that John Anderton inserts into his home video projector are certainly cool, and the way he scrambles for them evokes pathos around his obsession with his dead son. When detectives pull larger plastic plates out of one screen-machine and stick them into another one, it conveys urgency and seriousness. But even today, we mostly move data through wifi, cellular data connections and, in a pinch, cables. In 2054, getting data from one place to another will be faster, less labour-intensive and require even less material—our concern about reducing waste should be manic by then. All John Anderton’s memories will clog up landfill.
- Newspapers and paper photos. The paper photo is already a dying species, yet they abound in Minority Report. Spielberg does make newspapers and magazines interactive and updatable, but doesn’t really account for the fact that each periodical will eventually consumed on a single object like a tablet. It’s true that future tablets may look and feel like paper. But the art of newspaper design will have changed by then. Periodicals of the future, whatever form they take, will not emulate the typography and layout of today’s newspapers because they will be an adaptation of tablet content and use Internet-style layouts. Traditional newspaper design will be long dead.

- The need for psychic mutants to predict human behaviour. Big data, drawing from all the information we share about ourselves online, will make the world of Minority Report possible without a supernatural element (or the slavery element—those poor precogs!). Algorithms will interpret our posts and our pictures, using predictive patterns to figure out who’s going to go off the rails and, perhaps before the police are called in, subtly nudging possible perpetrators back from the edge of criminality. The law won’t have to storm in to stop crime; it will manipulate our online reality—increasingly becoming our primary reality—to change our mindset, reschedule encounters and warn potential victims of what may happen.
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