Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Utopia Is Creepy

roughtype.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 67 posts

Re: Utopia Is Creepy

#41

Post by nirbheek »

pnathan wrote: post #6

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 di…

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

Directional sound[1] tech is making leaps and bounds.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_from_ultrasound

Re: Utopia Is Creepy

#42

Post by jakeonthemove »

iso8859-1 wrote: post #38
jakeonthemove wrote: post #14

Utopia as its often depicted does suck, but the video shown by Microsoft is in no way utopian - it looks like the present, only with more displays (and invisible batteries). Also, it's 6 minutes of software perfection - I have that sometimes... before Windows throws me an error, my Bluetooth stack fails and disconnects my headphones, my virtual machine hangs up, my phone's browser freezes and I can't close it (damn y…

You can enable killing apps by long-pressing the back button in Cyanogenmod.

Thank you for the tip! I didn't even know about the feature. It's a weird issue in CM7, I guess I need to update again :-)...

Re: Utopia Is Creepy

#43

Post by civilian »

potatolicious wrote: post #13
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is technology between the upper class and middle class really that different? Don't plenty of middle class people have high-end smartphones today?

That's a good point - in the present technology between the upper and middle classes aren't that different, but in the video it sure as hell looks that way. Hyper-productive terminals for the creative class? What about industry? What about people working more mundane jobs instead of some future-eco-glamor-green-creative one? What will this crazy utopia-tech do for them? I wish they spent at least a few more seconds l…

First of all-- the technology was shown helping the bellhop in the microsoft video.

My friend works in a warehouse. It's not glamorous, and it's refrigerated, so it's maybe 40 F the whole time. A lot of the warehouse is automated, so he spends most of his time making sure that the equipment is doing what it needs to be doing. So, just one more anecdote about how technology is becoming a part of blue-collar work.

Re: Utopia Is Creepy

#44

Post by fleitz »

saalweachter wrote: post #10

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

In the future Microsoft has won their patent war against Google and we don't have driverless cars.

Re: Utopia Is Creepy

#45

Post by [deleted] »

xianshou wrote: post #4

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. H…

[deleted]

Re: Utopia Is Creepy

#46

Post by viraptor »

pnathan wrote: post #6

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 di…

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

If you make them fast enough but still visible they help a lot in showing the context. They can add some metadata which would be worse to explain otherwise. Of course there are also cases where they are flashy and waste time...

> those very popular mental cheetos activities

It's the first time I see this expression, but I'm afraid I have to steal and use it from now on. I love the comparison.

Re: Utopia Is Creepy

#47

Post by potatolicious »

civilian wrote: post #43
potatolicious wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point - in the present technology between the upper and middle classes aren't that different, but in the video it sure as hell looks that way. Hyper-productive terminals for the creative class? What about industry? What about people working more mundane jobs instead of some future-eco-glamor-green-creative one? What will this crazy utopia-tech do for them? I wish they spent at least a few more seconds l…

First of all-- the technology was shown helping the bellhop in the microsoft video. My friend works in a warehouse. It's not glamorous, and it's refrigerated, so it's maybe 40 F the whole time. A lot of the warehouse is automated, so he spends most of his time making sure that the equipment is doing what it needs to be doing. So, just one more anecdote about how technology is becoming a part of blue-collar work.

Oh, I'm well aware that technology has pervaded all walks of life - that's kind of my main beef with this video. It seems to wrap itself up entirely in this mythical environmental-engineering company, along with the very wealthy denizens of it, as if that will be the bulk, or even the theme of the world in the future... and in the end come off as rather sterile and soulless.

More interesting than whiz-bang animations of fictitious (and fantastical) office workflows IMO, would be electronic payments for the cab - imagine the woman stepping out of the taxi and seeing the cab cost, along with (something futuristic!) "submitted to expense account" or something. Or, say, traffic overlays on the windshield for the cab driver. Or for the bellhop, something more substantial than how much the guest's bags weigh (really?)

I'm having trouble distilling my thoughts on this - I guess I was expecting to see more problem-solving in a vision of the future rather than a whole lot of whiz-bang animations that look cool but are of dubious use... and solve previous few problems that are compelling.

Re: Utopia Is Creepy

#48

Post by zorked »

I happen to be re-reading Aldous Huxley's Island now. It's a utopia, and it isn't creepy at all: it's warm, tropical, physical, intentionally low-tech, productivity isn't a priority and technology (where it's accepted) actually serves to increase the time people spend living their lives. And it's very sexual, not "post-sexual".

I don't know how something imagined by a major corporation like Microsoft could ever be seen as a utopia. Yes, the streets are clean, but who the hell wants to live in a Microsoft future. Plastic generic people, a world so standardized that it doesn't matter where you are, human relations reduced to business transactions all under the watchful eye of omnipresent computers... it's classical dystopia, a world gone even worse than the "Blade Runner" world.

Re: Utopia Is Creepy

#50

Post by njharman »

fleitz wrote: post #40

It looks pretty lonely and soul crushingly transactional. A world where we know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Why don't we invent technologies that let us spend more time with friends and family and less time worrying about the production of goods and services? Wouldn't it be much more fun for the mother and child to spend time together baking something, than sliding recipes around the world? They…

> Why don't we invent technologies that let us spend more time with friends and family and less time worrying about the production of goods and services?

Because we've been propagandized into wealth/success race and sold out to consumerism. There's less money in spending time with F&F (also it sets bad precedent, that of enjoying life rather than paying for experiences. The 1% can't allow that.)

Post reply on HN