Utopia Is Creepy

Looks like Microsoft thinks that in the future we will all live inside Apple stores.

One of the main problems about technological visions of utopia is that they so often assume that perfection is the absence of problems. Perhaps, but the more a world approaches that perfection, the more limited it becomes by necessity. Hence, the glimpse of Microsoft's world of optimal productivity is a glimpse of an intellectual and spiritual desert: meetings without purposes, productivity with nothing to produce. Human ingenuity exists to solve problems, so it's extremely ironic what emerges when we project to a world where technological ingenuity has vanquished the problems we deal with today.

Couple notes.

* This is a straight conceptual extrapolation of current technology and designs. The only thing that I don't see coming from today's tech is the holographic projects. Oddly, most of the design seems to look like Apple-inspired tech. Does Apple consciously design to look like a sci-fi future? Or do their views of the future become shaped like Apple?

* In the cubes, there are no walls. The cube-dweller did not have headphones. Major, major "graaah"

* There are a ton of animations between slides in the screens. This is a waste of time.

* I didn't see any "stupid" activities like reading Failbook, watching MTV, any of those very popular mental cheetos activities. The future has "stupid" entertainment.

* Transparent fridge door = win. Where do I get one? I like that future!

* Also, one curious thing about this is that this is a presentation of rich people (that's not an indictment). The wealthy people whose houses I've visited who are rich in the US seem to have large amounts of space and everything seems to be insanely tidy (maid service? I don't know). Most less wealthy people have less space and things are a bit more jumbled up and around. This seems to be a conceptualization of a junior executive and her family.

> " There are a ton of animations between slides in the screens. This is a waste of time."*

Given the popularity of iOS and the growing popularity of OSX, I'd argue that most users disagree. Given the direction of Windows 8 it looks like we're getting more animation in the future, not less, and I for one am happy about that. Animation offers important cues as to the nature of the UI and data you're dealing with (the sliding screens of iOS and Android implies a hierarchy without having to waste time/space spelling it out for you, for example).

In any case, the MSFT video bothered me when I first saw it in a way that I couldn't really place, but after thinking about it some, I think my problem is this:

What is all of this utopian future-tech going to do for, well, regular people? The woman in the video is clearly very wealthy - I mean hell, her hotel has someone just standing around waiting for her cab from the airport. Her (presumable) husband and child live in a home far larger and more luxurious than anything my sorry middle-class ass grew up with. It feels... elitist.

Yeah okay, so jetsetting VPs and rich people have some sweet-ass tech in the future... but where is the technology for the everyman? I'd much rather watch/read about what technology of the future will do for everyone, not just the minted upper-class. Maybe it's just the economy we've had recently, but the video feels slightly repulsive in the fact that their vision of future technology apparently has no middle-class people, or indeed, middle-class concerns.

Did anyone else notice that the taxi at the beginning was very pointedly not a driverless robot car?