The Star Trek Holodeck: coming soon
Just in from PSFK, this news; the Star Trek Holodeck is coming. Woo-hoo! Apparently IDEO have been testing it out with a company called EON reality. Still very expensive, or course, but expect prices to plummet soon I’d imagine.
In the PSFK article, they say allude to something I’ve believed for a long time…
“…many hold Star Trek as an inspiration pool for future technologies”
Not just Star Trek, of course; I believe most Sci-fi can offer us inspiration for what actual real world products and relationships we’re going to see in the future.
It’s clear why too; take some creative thinking people (writers, fantasists, storytellers etc), and get them to invent a view of the world way off in the future, where they can innovate to their hearts content; creating technologies unbounded by the realities that face engineers, designers and the people who actually have to build stuff, and situations where society is changed beyond recognition.
My personal favourite is probably Iain M Banks‘ work with a future society he calls ‘The Culture’. From Wikipedia…
The Culture is a fictional anarchist, socialistic, and utopian society created by the Scottish writer Iain M. Banks and described by him in several of his novels and shorter fictions.
The Culture is characterised by being a post-scarcity society (meaning that its advanced technologies provide practically limitless material wealth and comforts for everyone for free, having all but abolished the concept of possessions), by having overcome almost all physical constraints on life (including disease and death) and by being an almost totally egalitarian, stable society without the use of any form of force or compulsion, except where necessary to protect others.
Now, that may sound quite a long way from where we are at the moment… but within it you start to see elements of today’s world. Specifically in the case of The Culture, the notion of ‘post-scarcity’ where everything, and anything, is free to the members of society…
…with Chris Anderson’s forthcoming book, Free is going to feature a lot in the conversations we have over the next five years I think.
So, to prepare yourself…
Read Chris Anderson’s original ‘free’ essay here:
…and get yourself a copy of the brilliant Iain M Banks book ‘The Player of Games‘…
…and hell, you should really go and see the new Star Trek film too…
Welcome to the future. Or at the very least, thinking about it…
]]>