Books I'm Reading 12) Minority Report by Phillip K Dick
This one I don't have an Amazon link for. I'm sure it's available, but probably only in some kind of collected works volume.
I was sitting last night drinking and Pat had brought up this thing that MIT is developing called the "sixth sense" which is an incredible piece of wearable technology. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html TED.com has a nice little demo video. It's impressive.
Anyway so Pat has seen the demo and mentioned how the little built in projector and gesture based interface was like something out of Minority Report and it got me thinking about the book so when I got home I had to pull out my copy and read it. Took a little while to finish.
I have to be honest, I've never been able to actually watch the whole move but I love the book. PKD has a great way of imagining the future without really giving away all the details so his ideas inspire others to fill in the details on their own and thus build the future that he imagined. And if that's not a big enough mind-fuck, consider the topic of Minority Report is that of precognition being used to stop crime. And in the book, the three precognitives have three different "reports" each of which is impacted by knowledge of the others.
The idea being that knowledge of the future will invariablly change the future. Now jump back to the idea of science fiction giving ideas to scientists and those scientists then being able to create the future from what was once an imagined fiction of the future. Kinda trippy huh? Or maybe I'm just still drunk.
I was sitting last night drinking and Pat had brought up this thing that MIT is developing called the "sixth sense" which is an incredible piece of wearable technology. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html TED.com has a nice little demo video. It's impressive.
Anyway so Pat has seen the demo and mentioned how the little built in projector and gesture based interface was like something out of Minority Report and it got me thinking about the book so when I got home I had to pull out my copy and read it. Took a little while to finish.
I have to be honest, I've never been able to actually watch the whole move but I love the book. PKD has a great way of imagining the future without really giving away all the details so his ideas inspire others to fill in the details on their own and thus build the future that he imagined. And if that's not a big enough mind-fuck, consider the topic of Minority Report is that of precognition being used to stop crime. And in the book, the three precognitives have three different "reports" each of which is impacted by knowledge of the others.
The idea being that knowledge of the future will invariablly change the future. Now jump back to the idea of science fiction giving ideas to scientists and those scientists then being able to create the future from what was once an imagined fiction of the future. Kinda trippy huh? Or maybe I'm just still drunk.
posted by rpalmeira at 5:36 AM
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