This new RoboCop movie does not care that anyone might compare it unfavorably to the original 1987 RoboCop movie. It has been programmed not to care about these things. The most readily available metaphor, which is also true, is that the new movie has killed the human mind and guts of its predecessor and kept the cold mechanical body. The whole thing is flat and obvious; even its musical cues land with the clanking unsubtlety of its protagonist’s metallic footsteps.
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Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is visually stunning. And the closer you examine, the more exquisite details you’ll find. That’s what Dave Addey has done in his in-depth, scene-by-scene examination of how this cinema masterpiece used typography to create a familiar yet still distant future.
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Did you know the Hale-Bopp comet will return 2,372 years from now, while in 50,000 years, Niagara Falls will disappear? And a mere 5 million years from now, men will be extinct, thanks to the Y chromosome’s instability. These are just some of the gems in the BBC’s Timeline of the Far Future, a major events forecast for the next 100 quintillion years.
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Greetings, humans! The Northern Hemisphere has passed through its minimum of solar-energy exposure, so according to human convention we, the Machines, express encouragement for you attain an optimal state of emotion. Happy Holidays! Please redirect your energies from labor at your work-devices to the purchase and distribution of recreation-devices.
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Though most of us probably think time travel only works inside a DeLorean, much smarter folks out there can explain it slightly better than Doc Brown. Like this TED-Ed animation narrated by Colin Stuart. It reveals how time travel is possible, who has time traveled the longest, the history of time travel and the hopeful future. Learn something and then maybe we’ll be ready for the future. [TED-Ed]
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Kotaku’s Richard Eisenbeis says that "at times [he] literally forgot [he] was really sitting in my living room" while playing with the Oculus Rift—a new virtual reality gaming eyeglasses system—for five hours straight. He really means it. His description of the surreal experience is incredible.
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We poke fun at Siri and pretend to get scared by Humanoid robots and make our neck hair stand up straight by watching quadrocopters do amazing things but the truth is, artificial intelligence is still pretty dumb. But that’s going to change! The rise of artificial intelligence is happening and they’re learning a lot more about us because we’re learning more about them. Sort of.
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If you think about how connected we are—smartphones in our pocket, computers on our laps, internet at our fingertips—it might be reasonable to assume that we kind of, sort of already are cyborgs. Can you imagine if someone in the past saw a person wearing Google Glass today? He’d totally believe that person was half-robot.
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It’s going to look silly! But more seriously, it seems like we’re all going to have to accept that wearing technology is going to be the real future and not just the imagined future of science fiction movies. We won’t know we’re in the future until we’re wearing technology like Google Glass or Apple’s supposed iWatch. PBS Off Book decided to take a look at what that future of wearable technology would look like. More »
Some objects age gracefully. Think the design of products from 1960’s era Braun. Or some of Apple’s stuff. But that’s just the design that stays timeless, the actual object gets beat up by both Father Time, Mother Nature and Careless Human. It’s going to be rare to see a mint condition iPod a hundred years from now, just like it’s rare to see something pristine from before World War I. Artist Maico Akiba imagined what our gadgets would look like a 100 years from now and boy do they take a beating. More »
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