How Minority Report Predicted the Future With Surprising Accuracy

While we don’t yet know what impact the new Minority Report TV series will have on society, there’s little doubt that the original 2002 film had a huge impact on technology. A number of future technological advances displayed in Minority Report are now a reality in some form or another, and it’s tough to say whether that’s because of the film’s use of scientists in predicting what would come to pass, or because of today’s scientists being influenced by the movie. Either way, the movie’s vision for 2054 is looking more and more accurate every day.

Before making the film, Steven Spielberg gathered together a team of no fewer than 16 scientists. Their task? To come up with a realistic vision of what the world might look like in the year 2054. As you’re about to see, the team which included researchers from MIT and DARPA, really hit the nail on the head.

Here are some technologies that Minority Report predicted that exist today.

Gesture-Control Interfaces

The first thing that comes to most people’s minds when they think of Minority Report is the image of Tom Cruise using his hands to conduct data across a screen without ever touching it. And we now have the ability to do just that. Microsoft unveiled their gesture-based Kinect system for X-Box 360 back in 2010, and the technology has since expanded to be used in other arenas. And unlike Cruise’s gadget, no gloves are needed.

Driverless Cars

Who could forget the scene where Cruise traverses, outside of a vehicle, across a highway of self-driving cars? A scene like this could unfold sooner than we expect if Google has their way. The tech giant has been experimenting with their autonomous cars for quite some time, and have now logged over a million miles on the road. Now, with actual automakers like Audi and Tesla getting in on the self-driving game, the future is now.

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70 Years of Korean War

It was the day after the death blow to Nagasaki, 70 years ago, that the victors of the most awesomest war ever chose to create a division of Korea along the 38th parallel — a line that would be revered as a holy thing when North Korean troops later came across it, but dismissed as “imaginary” when U.S. troops crossed it heading north.

The Korean war was to World War II what the anthrax letters were to 9-11 — without it sanity had a real chance; militarism was being scaled back drastically until the Korean war created the excuse for the permanent imperial war economy; but almost nobody even recalls what happened. Even Dean Acheson, who had imposed sanctions on Japan that led to Pearl Harbor and whose decision it was to fight a horrible war in Korea, is almost unknown. In part this is because the war coincided with McCarthyism, and few dared speak the truth about it at the time. In part it is because remembering it brings predominantly shame and disgust.

Before the war came the U.S. occupation of the South, the repression of leftists, the massacres of the people by the U.S. and South Koreans, including the slaughter of 30,000 to 60,000 on Jeju Island where South Korea is now building a huge new base for the U.S. Navy. Then came aggression from the South, including a year of raids across the sacred 38th parallel, and the South’s announced intention to invade the North.

When the North invaded the South, the United States falsely blamed the Soviet Union and lied itself together a coalition of the willing at the United Nations by claiming to have captured Russian troops. As soon as U.S. General Douglas MacArthur got the chance, he proceeded, with President Truman‘s approval, right across the 38th and up to the border of China. MacArthur had been drooling for a war with China and threatening it, and asked for permission to attack, which the Joint Chiefs of Staff refused. Eventually, Truman fired MacArthur. Attacking a power plant in North Korea that supplied China, and bombing a border city, was the closest MacArthur got to what he wanted. But the U.S. threat to China, or at least the U.S. threat to defeat North Korea, brought the Chinese and Russians into the war.

During the course of the war, the U.S. bombed flat virtually every city and town in the North and many in the South — three years of carpet bombing with no serious concern for civilian casualties, and the bombing of dams to flood and starve the population. Villages were fire-bombed and napalmed. A New York Times reporter described a village with everyone frozen in place as they had been going about their lives, as in Pompei, but burned to death by napalm. We think of Vietnam as the napalm war, but that was much more so Korea. U.S. and South Korean troops also massacred civilians on the ground. The North committed numerous atrocities as well, but the really big ones, as far as we know, were all on the U.S. side. The U.N. convention on genocide was created while the United States was engaged in that crime against people whom American troops almost universally called “gooks.” Back home the public knew little about the war yet still managed to despise it. Truman’s approval rating set a record low not to be undercut until George W. Bush’s presidency.

The never known “forgotten” war cost Korea two million civilian lives and the United States 37,000 soldiers, while turning Seoul and Pyongyang both into piles of rubble. Many of the dead had been killed at close range, slaughtered unarmed and in cold-blood by both sides. And the border was right back where it had been, but the hatred directed across that border greatly increased. When the war ended, having accomplished no good for anyone but weapons makers, “people emerged from a mole-like existence in caves and tunnels to find a nightmare in the bright of day.”

And no peace was ever formally made. The war officially continues to this day. The U.S. never left the South, never left off keeping the country divided just as prior to the war, never gave up command of the South Korean military, never ceased threatening and provoking the North. The Pentagon’s latest statement of its reason to exist includes North Korea as one of four countries that it admits have no interest in fighting the United States but which nonetheless present “security concerns.”

The people of Korea don’t need any more “help.” Enough is enough. After 70 years, leave them be.

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"Orwellian" FBI Says Citizens Should Have No Secrets That The Government Can't Access

The police and surveillance state predicted in the forward-looking 1940s classic “1984” by George Orwell, has slowly, but steadily, come to fruition. However,

The latest sign of this stealth takeover of civil rights and freedom was epitomized in recent Senate testimony by FBI Director James Comey, who voiced his objections to civilian use of encryption to protect personal data – information the government has no automatic right to obtain.

As reported by The New American, Comey testified that he believes the government’s spy and law enforcement agencies should have unfettered access to everything Americans may store or send in electronic format: On computer hard drives, in so-called i-clouds, in email and in text messaging – for our own safety and protection. Like many in government today, Comey believes that national security is more important than constitutional privacy protections or, apparently, due process. After all, aren’t criminals the only ones who really have anything to hide?

In testimony before a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee entitled “Going Dark: Encryption, Technology, and the Balance Between Public Safety and Privacy” Comey said that in order to stay one step ahead of terrorists, as well as international and domestic criminals, Uncle Sam’s various spy and law enforcement agencies should have access to available technology used to de-encrypt protected data. Also, he believes the government should be the final arbiter deciding when decryption is necessary.

What could go wrong there?

Government, at all levels, is responsible

During the hearing, TNA reported, technology experts warned the panel that giving the FBI limitless access to the personal electronic data of Americans would open it up to exploitation by “bad actors.” But Comey was having none of that.

“It is clear that governments across the world, including those of our closest allies, recognize the serious public safety risks if criminals can plan and undertake illegal acts without fear of detection,” he told the committee.

“Are we comfortable with technical design decisions that result in barriers to obtaining evidence of a crime?”

So, in essence, Comey – like many before him, especially since the global war on terror was launched – believes that, in the name of national security Americans ought to give up more of their individual and constitutional rights because that’s the only way we can be adequately protected.

Perhaps realizing that his Senate hearing testimony was public, Comey gave the Constitution a passing glance, noting that the government should respect the “requirements and safeguards of the laws” and the country’s founding document. However, as Americans now know, spy agencies during the past two presidential administrations have been tasked increasingly with conducting warrantless, unchecked surveillance of Americans’ electronic data and communications.

But all of this is not on men like Comey and Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Congress bears its share of responsibility, too.

This is the way it is – shut up and take it

When such activities of the National Security Agency were exposed in 2013 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, many in the media and among the American electorate were quick to blame the agency, as if it was somehow acting out of rogue instinct.

The reality is, however, that the agency is tasked to perform its duties– either by statutory law (think the USA Patriot Act) or by presidential directive (think Bush’s order after 9/11 to conduct warrantless surveillance).

“We are not asking to expand the government’s surveillance authority, but rather we are asking to ensure that we can continue to obtain electronic information and evidence pursuant to the legal authority that Congress has provided to us to keep America safe,” Comey said during the Senate hearing.

What does all this mean? It simply means that at every level, government considers its own citizens hostile.

Oh, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

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