But enough of the film critique, what about futurist Michio Kaku’s ideas? I have to say that every time I listen to a “futurist” it serves only to solidify the disappointing fact that futurists have no idea what they’re talking about. Before I get into the details of how practically everything they talked about is either undesirable or suboptimal, I want to address a more basic point.

Why is it that when you get a bunch of geeks together to envision “the future” they can’t help but imagine that for reasons unknown, Segway Personal Transportation devices will be popular? I’m sorry, but they will never be more than an eccentric toy for the wealthy. Consider the fact that in order for a significant fraction of the population to travel with Segways, there would need to be a dramatic overhaul of city planning for obvious reasons.

Why does everyone assume that in the future fascism will be okay? On this subject, I found David Brin’s book “The Transparent Society” excellent in college and it’s perhaps even more relevant today. I’ll get into this more later.

The first thing we’re supposed to have in 2057 is portable, free-standing holographic everything (including gender-color-coded dolphin guide/pets to be inflicted on the overstimulated masses). First off, let’s assume this comes to pass. The sidewalk will be a nauseating kaleidoscope of overlapping holographic dolphins, secretaries, advertisements, communiques, and who knows what all else. Add to that people walking through the holograms leaving a short wake of disrupted holograms and I can just imagine the poor epileptics unable to go outside because of the sure-fire grand mals they’ll be privy to. This brings up an interesting question. With so many holograms floating around, how will these security cameras make out anything more than a sea of psychedelic light? Why wouldn’t criminals wrap themselves in shifting holographic disguises to confound video tracking systems? Answer: they would. But more on that later.

Perhaps a more fundamental problem with the whole free-standing holograms idea is that I expect that, like the Segway, they will never go beyond an eccentric curiosity for the rich. To be brief… briefer… I’ll simply say that I find it doubtful that all the physical and technological problems with truly freestanding holograms will be worked out before direct neural interfaces are developed that allow users to have a full sensory experience generated by computer but indistinguishable from reality.

I don’t have so many fundamental problems with self-driving cars. Again though, Dr. Kaku shows his limited view in that he didn’t imagine that if cars can see their environment well enough to drive themselves, they can see traffic patterns themselves and could use WiFi to communicate with each other directly.

The show also makes the illogical assumption that data management will be centralized in the future. How Dr. Kaku supposes this will happen is beyond me since the underlying architecture of the internet is inextricably decentralized. Even if such a thing were attempted and succeeded, it would make the internet so inefficient that it may become effectively worthless.

The “smart house” concept is appealing, but it again makes the assumption that what consumers want is “grocery shopping from your couch,” or really “as much from your couch as technologically possible”. The companies that depend on the insatiable appetite of an ever more apathetic and consumerist culture dearly hope we will become increasingly Eloi-esque in the future. “Eloism” isn’t sustainable now, let alone the kinds of automated hyper-consumerism Kaku projects for us in 2057. I also question whether this sort of automation really creates less work. Will large companies like Nestle be able to acquire preferential status with refrigerator software programmers so that your refrigerator tends to choose Nestle products if you don’t specify another brand? Will you have to tell your refrigerator that you don’t actually want any more of something, so it shouldn’t order it when you run low? Will you have to tell it of your travel plans, what about unplanned trips? I’m not opposed to smart houses in general, but we should remember that the point of all this fancy technology should be to qualitatively improve the lives of people and smart houses should be designed with that in mind. As a side note, are comfortable looking sofas outlawed in the future or something, because you never see them.

The show’s assertion that massive computer enhanced surveillance networks should be in the hands of law enforcement is poorly defended and naive. Why the producers didn’t think that they’d need to explain what technological marvel made fascism became friendly is also beyond me.

The idea of an urban “central command” is also ridiculous, as that type of architecture is really antithetical to the very basis of the internet (which is decentralized). For ease of use, versatility, expense, and other reasons, it’s reasonable to suppose that the “internet city” of the future will be an unmoderatable orgy of peer-to-peer interactions. It would be more resistant to disruption. A central command like this would be constantly shut down by various attacks.

Anyway.

Ben