It's always fun when you see elements of dystopian visions of the future coming true. Arnold Schwarzennegger is a successful politician just like in Demolitiion Man and now in what seemed like the most horrifying aspect of Minority Report come to life some entrepreneurs are "equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard."
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Dystopia is the Best
01 Jun 2008 08:56 am
Comments (16)
Matt. Don't believe what DC pundits tell you. Schwarzenegger is NOT a successful politician. He has done NOTHING as governor and his approval ratings are lower than Bush in California. I know the national media continue to lionize him because they like the storyline but people who saw him up close here can confirm he is a catastrophe.
Much like the facial recognition pushed by security companies, at this stage I think what we actually have here is a company scamming advertisers by claiming to provide data that it can't really provide. At least in this case the false positives don't result in people being detained for questioning because "the computer" says they match a known terrorist, just being shown the wrong ad.
No doubt the terrorist scanning will be added later.
I would have thought that the most horrifying aspect of Minority Report was convicting people of crimes they haven't yet committed.
...at this stage I think what we actually have here is a company scamming advertisers by claiming to provide data that it can't really provide.
That was actually my suspicion too on reading the linked article.
Bangs, I think it's a tie between that and the electronic spiders that can send electric shocks through water until you surface so they can forcibly scan your eyes.
One of my friends in the MIT Media Lab set up something similar, on a smaller scale, at a technical conference some years ago. A large format display was set up with a Web browser running. Everyone at the conference wore a badge with information that could be detected remotely (RFID or something comparable). The system scanned the people in front of the display, and made whatever inferences it could about their interests (e.g., it could have searched for their home pages, though I don't recall if it did this specifically). The system then decided, based on the crowd composition, what to show in the browser and when to navigate to a different page.
I would have thought that the most horrifying aspect of Minority Report was convicting people of crimes they haven't yet committed.
That's pretty bad, but the plot of Minority Report implied pretty strongly that Tom Cruise raised a child for a while. That's the most terrifying thing I've ever seen in a movie. A close second would be that scene in Chain Reaction where Keanu Reeves actually appeared to read. Spooky Stuff.
Not to mention the real-world version of Sky Net which also figured prominently in ... wait for it ... "Terminator 2".
If that's the most horrifying aspect of Minority Report I'm glad I skipped it. I thought it sounded boring when I thought there was more to it than that.
Has Tom Cruise been in a few good movies, but as far as I can tell it's been a very long time.
Bob Barr is going to get a lot of votes.
How about how our government names programs the opposite of what they do (Clear Skies, Healthy Forests), just like in 1984.
"How about how our government names programs the opposite of what they do (Clear Skies, Healthy Forests), just like in 1984."
I think that 1984 was supposed to be a commentary on the society in which Orwell was living at the time.
One of my friends in the MIT Media Lab set up something similar, on a smaller scale, at a technical conference some years ago.
Which was precisely the reason those things appeared in Minority Report in the first place. Many of the technological gadgets featured in Minority Report were placed there on the consulting advice of technologists who were working or evangelizing for those ideas while they were in progress.
True Confession
I've watched Chain Reaction almost as many times as I've watched Under Seige. It isn't as good, but it's a fun movie.
If you want a movie that ended up frighteningly prophetic, try the original Robocop. Dick Jones, Ronny Cox's character in that movie begins a presentation for a massive killer robot by listing all the non-traditional business ventures that OCP has done: Healthcare, Military, Police, Prisons- like I said, scary.
As for Minority Report, I'd hardly call it boring. It's pretty action-packed.
Comments closed June 15, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Buy now, John Anderton, buy now!
Posted by Just Dropping By | June 1, 2008 9:15 AM