Communion Of Dreams

Via BoingBoing, an interesting (though dated – written in 2003)  paper by Michael Schmitz titled Human Computer Interaction in Science Fiction Movies.  This paper deals just with movies, but naturally all authors want to see their books translated into that medium, so…

The paper is an interesting survey of how human-computer interactions have been depicted.  Perhaps the most interesting section deals with the movie Minority Report
from 2002 (which I just saw last year), and talks about how in the time period of the movie (2048 – about the same time period as I set for Communion) retina-recognition will allow for ubiquitous ID of individuals, and how this will not only be used by the government, but also by advertisers and marketing departments.

[Mild spoiler warning.]

This was actually part of the reason that I designed the ‘evolution’ of the tech I posit for the expert systems in my book – as part of a new manifestation of the battle between privacy and business.  Because I too think that companies will employ increasingly intrusive technologies to identify and track consumer spending habits – we can see this already in on-line shopping at places like Amazon.com, or in ‘Rewards’ systems at grocery stores and other retailers where you get a discount for allowing them to track your purchasing habits.  I think that sooner or later our basic ‘ad/spam blocker’ type of software will become more sophisticated in thwarting the attempts to invade our privacy, and that eventually primative artificial intelligence expert systems such as we have now will be used in this manner.  In the classic battle between armour and firepower, the whole thing will tend to escalate, until we reach the point where we have the technology behind Seth (the S-series gel-based computing systems).  Of course, along the way many other functions will be bundled into such an expert system, the aggregation leading to something akin to true artificial intelligence.

Jim Downey