How Minority Report shaped the future
I went to hear Alex McDowell speak at the Houses of Parliament last week, courtesy of Creative England. McDowell was the production designer on Minority Report as well as many other movies. He also founded the World Building Institute and is Professor of Cinema Practice at the University of South California.
The creative process behind Minority Report was unusual because director Stephen Spielberg asked Alex and the design team to create a world before they had a script. The world would be a city in 2054 and Spielberg’s brief was “future reality” rather than “science fiction”. The world they imagined went on to influence the script. For example, they predicted that cars would move in 3 dimensions around the city and, as a consequence of that, the movie features a car chase with star Tom Cruise at one point climbing up a ladder of cars.
To realise “future reality”, the team spent a long time researching technological innovations in the pipeline of companies like Amazon and Google. Ideas like personalised ads following Cruise around the city are Amazon’s “If you like that, you will like these” feature taken to an extreme.
Other innovations featured in the movie which are becoming reality today include driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial and optical recognition, gesture-based computing, 3-D video and wearable tech. Even predictive policing, the central concept of the movie, is not being practised to some extent by up to 20% of the US’s largest police forces.
The implication is that not only does art brings technological innovation to a mass audience, but by doing so it creates demand and so shapes supply. The ideas picked up on by the moviemakers have a much better chance of becoming real.
We can see the truth in this when infeasible innovations get continued attention and support. The Back to the Future franchise generated interested in very feasible drones and augmented reality devices, but also the much harder to realise hoverboards. The movie created a market for a product that hasn’t been invented yet.
Sometimes the art inspires a more lateral leap, like when Garret Camp was watching JamesBond in Casino Royale track the icon of a car he was chasing on his smartphone. That idea that cars could be tracked and viewed stuck with him and was one spark behind the creation of Uber.
Universal Basic Income was an old idea that was nurtured in various science fiction stories and is now fizzling like its day has come, supported by giants of tech like Eon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who no doubt read a few of those stories as they were growing up.
My friends over at The Alternative have reported several examples of how artists, and sci-fi writers shape the future, including the story of SciFutures, an LA consultancy that commissions writers to imagine futures for corporate clients.
Alex McDowell talked about operating in the nexus between artistic brilliance and new technology. This is where the future can be found, and it always has been. Just as photography originally needed artists to show the world what the new technology could, so every innovation since has to be imagined by artists before we can experience it for real.
