People in the XIX century had quite a vivid imagination. Directors and screenwriters worked hard on sci-fi movies to astonish their audience and offer them their visions of the nearest future. Sometimes when you watch these old-fashioned films, you can't help but think that they could have had a time machine. Some 40 years ago, students and youths were obsessed with sci-fi movies. Could they have imagined that the things that had impressed them the most would have come true in the nearest future? Had they ever thought that they could have remote online classes or text a professor? If a student from the previous century had known that it would be possible to type "write my paper for me" in Google and receive it by the end of the day, they would have thought it's crazy. In general, people would have considered the majority of devices around us to be wild and surreal. But what else was inspired by old sci-fi films?
The Terminator
The first "Terminator" was released in 1984. Clearly, we are far away from the threat of attack by Skynet, but, according to the plot, artificial intelligence prevailed already in 2029. But the very idea of computer superintelligence, developing with the help of the World Wide Web, is quite embodied in reality. Now, technology is developing in two directions. On the one hand, technological robotic assistants are being created. Sometimes they remind people. On the other hand, artificial intelligence is developing with high speed, exploring the virtual space. With the help of neural networks, AI learns to communicate with us under the guise of real accounts. It is almost impossible to determine whether there is a person on the other side of the screen. But what a robot learns from a person is another question. Thus, in 2016, Microsoft introduced artificial intelligence called Tay, which began to communicate with the users of the network through Twitter. After a few hours, the company had to censor its invention and stop the project for a while. After learning to communicate with real users, AI began to write curses and racist comments. As a result, Microsoft employees deleted almost all tweets of their artificial intelligence and left a farewell on behalf of the bot. Now there is a new online-child of Microsoft. Artificial Intelligence is called Xiaoice, and sometimes its answers are almost indistinguishable from human ones.
Total Recall
We have not yet reached the key technologies that drive the plot of the movie "Total Recall". The system for the integration of memories and the colonization of Mars still sound fantastic. But the self-driving car is quite real nowadays.
By the way, the first prototypes of smart cars began to develop in the 1950s. Now many companies, such as Uber, Tesla, and Google, are developing auto-pilot vehicles. You can already see them on the roads. However, smart cars are still not equipped with a talkative robot-driver, as in the movie. But maybe that's for the best?
Minority Report
It is 2054. A pilot program was developed based on mental technology. Through it, pre-criminal police officers can learn about a homicide that had not yet been committed and arrest a suspect even before the crime was committed.
Steven Spielberg's movie was released in 2002. It's based on the story of the famous fiction writer Philip Dick. For the film to come out as accurate as possible, the director resorted to the help of futurologists. Some things from the film have already come true today: personalized advertising, which haunts the main character, very similar to the context advertising, which has stopped to surprise us. And touchless interfaces that respond to hand movements appeared in 2010, although not yet had time to become as spectacular as in the "Minority Report".
Back to the Future
"Back to the Future" is an iconic science fiction trilogy about traveling in time. One of the most favorite films made by producer Steven Spielberg and director Robert Zemeckis is its second part of the trilogy. In the movie, created in 1989, the protagonists go almost 30 years in the future, to October 21, 2015, which is already the past for us.
In the first part, we see the glasses hiding the good half of Doc's face. A microphone goes from them to the scientist's mouth. It becomes clear that this is not just a protection against sunlight, but some kind of tricky device. And then Marty's son sits at the table, watching TV with the same glasses. A flying camera, smartwatch, access to the building with a fingerprint, tablets, smart homes, cashless payment in a taxi and information about traffic jams have not just appeared in our world, but have become an essential part of our lives.
Fahrenheit 451
The famous novel by Ray Bradbury "Fahrenheit 451" has always been a favorite book of high-school students around the world, and Francois Truffaut tried his hand at screening the book in 1966.
In this film, there is an exciting technology, which wisely predicts the emergence of headphones and modern headphone culture. In "Fahrenheit 451, "seashells" are described as tiny, thimble-like radio hubs, and the electronic ocean of sounds — music and voices - waves wash the banks of the awake brain. In 1966, the closest thing to the auricle sound was a transistor radio. And although headphones existed, they were extremely bulky. Bradbury and Truffaut represented a world with tiny headphones the size of thimbles that reproduced private audio — both music and conversation.
The first players with in-ear headphones appeared a few decades ago when we were able to listen to both music and conversations, now known as podcasts.
