Ever Changing Technology

Science fiction movies predict the future in many ways, but also get lots of stuff horribly wrong.

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by Ethan Hausmann

Recently I watched a couple of movies that made me chuckle at how vastly inaccurate they depicted the technology of the future.

Science fiction influencing reality (well sort of)
The first movie was the 1982 classic, Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford. I was watching it to get ready for the new Blade Runner 2049. At one point, I thought it was funny that in the movie we had flying cars and androids who look like people, but still used old-fashioned Kodak photographs. The movie is supposed to be taking place in 2019. Apparently the idea of digital pictures escaped the minds of the writers. The other movie was the 2002 film Minority Report starring Tom Cruise. In that movie the characters transferred data by physically inserting a glass floppy disc-like item into their computers. This seemed cumbersome to me, especially since they were using telepathic people to predict murders and then stop them. You think they would have thought of a more efficient way to store and transfer data for the year 2054.

Our reality
We might not have flying cars or androids or precrime predictions, but we do have something called "the cloud." This is where pictures, data, and whatever else you want is stored digitally in a remote location and accessed any time via the internet. This technology replaces photographs, floppy discs, CDs, and even flash drives.

The future of technology?
The movies we make today might showcase possible future technology, but we really don't know. Who would have thought that we would store data in "the cloud" and be able to access it at any time anywhere in the world. Twenty years ago, almost nobody could predict it. Because of this, keep on top of new technology as it develops and recognize how you can best utilize it for your life and your business. There are currently several different technologies on the horizon. Will augmented reality be the next big thing? What about self-driving cars? Or something completely different? We'll just have to see what the next twenty years hold in the realm of technology.