Friday 25 December 2009

Quibbling about unamibitious futurology

So I'm reading and enjoying this fun story on The Onion:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/ghost_of_christmas_future_taunts
where The Ghost Of Christmas Future taunts kids with 2016's Playstation 5, and I'm thinking surely things will be more advanced than that by then.

They suggest 2016 games will have "a PS5 hooked up to 2016's most popular TV, the 4'x8' Hi-Def Sony Titania" and that "you can play this against 63 other PS5 owners simultaneously" and imagines "Star Wars—Episode IX: Jedi Destiny, a game which employs the world's most advanced artificial-intelligence algorithm to place the player inside the film's climactic battle sequence on the planet Mon Jeedam".

Surely this is unamibitious isn't it? I recently dug up a copy of a comic from 1989, obscure American thing by second string creators, can't remember the name. But the outstanding thing was how poor the predicting was. Some guy had the equivalent of superpowers because he had a chip in his brain that could store, gasp, 2 gigabytes of memory. In 1989 the idea of storing 2GB was not expected to happen for 50 years. Now I can store that on my watch.

And when I was trying to write Ghost Rider 2099 in 1994 (I never got any stories picked up) I was imagining the internet, of which I had no first hand experience, as something you'd fly into like all magic with hologram worlds and chips in your heads. The scripts they went with had people sitting in front of fat computers with cabels all over the oche. Nice to draw obviously, but not that good prediction wise.

So, for this prediction of PS5 in 2016, not that I'm a game playing person, but I'd say everything's in 3D and virtual reality, so no old-fashioned TV screens involved. And.. I've just realised I can't be bothered continuing this thought, Gavin & Stacey's on.

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