[TV Show] 2057 - The City

Ok, issues with the Discovery Channel’s 2057.

Let’s start with “The City”.

Giant Holograms
This installment opens with a scene of a city with giant holograms around buildings. There are a few reasons I don’t think it’s likely that there will be such things, one of which I'll talk about later. One reason I’ll focus on now is actually relatively minor and that’s that I think Americans, by and large, will find that distasteful (with certain exceptions). If you travel in many other countries, and especially in Japan, you’ll see large-scale outdoor advertising on buildings, but for some reason that really hasn’t caught on here (with New York City being a notable exception). I’d be a bit surprised if that aesthetic had reversed itself by 2057 (though not a LOT surprised, frankly).

Flying Cars
In the same opening sequence we see flying cars traveling what appears to be a virtual highway. While I don’t think this is entirely out of the question, some serious obstacles (as I’ve touched on before) will need to be overcome for this to be a reality. And the importance of these obstacles are not strictly technical in nature.

First either the flying car needs to produce relatively little sound, or people have to not care about it. Current powered air craft make quite a bit of noise in order to sustain themselves.

Second, people need to be accepting of cars as part of their view of the sky. Sky-car highways may prove to be too much of an eyesore to…uh…get off the ground.

Third, there is the issue of falling debris. Technical problems must not cause collisions, people cannot be able to jettison material from the vehicle, and the vehicle will have to not drop anything of significance for its entire life. A few falling cars or even bits of debris could mean a serious restriction on how such vehicles are used. Perhaps they might even be restricted to traveling only over existing land-based roads to minimize such issues. That’d be nicely ironic.

An issue that has raised its head more recently is the cost of fuel. Unless engines become a lot more efficient, or the cost of fuel drops dramatically, the cost of the energy required to keep a car off of the ground may be the biggest barrier to its success.

Giant Kinetic Art
Also in the intro sequence we see what looks like a giant (as tall as a building) spinning helix that appears to be part of a building. Again, I wonder if our aesthetics will prevent us from having such fixtures as part of our skylines. A massive moving piece like this would continually attract the eye, and that may be its demise.

Segways? Really!?!
We move to a street scene that’s either under an overpass, or underground. The Audi that’s featured in the movie AI makes an appearance (good to see Audi getting as much mileage out of that concept car as I appear to be getting out of travel-related puns).

And then there’s a man riding a Segway. Unless the Segway company does something really remarkable, I think it’s opportunity to be a futuristic travel mode has now passed. If they DID do something remarkable, I would expect that it would look much different than the slightly modified version we see in this scene.

Futuristic Clothes
It’s tough to guess at what fashion will look like in 50 years, so I guess I’m not surprised to see the classic “futuristic” clothing style being marched out here. My feeling is that we’ve only gotten more casual over the last 50 years, so it would seem unlikely that we’d go the more formal route that this kind of clothing always seems to convey, but then again, fashion is fickle. If you showed someone from the 50’s an outfit from the 80’s they might consider that “futuristic”. In any case, I expect to see a lot of heterogeneity in the way people dress, regardless of the style.

Holographic Dolphin
We are shown a boy walking through the street scene with a holographic dolphin at his side. There are a number of reasons I think that this is unlikely, and much like with the flying car, some of the important ones are non-technical. I think anyone who has a dolphin as a holographic pet is likely to get beaten until they choose something a bit more peer-appropriate. And things that are peer-appropriate may not be appropriate elsewhere, so it may be difficult for this trend to get started.

More importantly, however, and this is a theme that I expect to come up over and over again (I’m pausing the program as I watch to write this, so I don’t exactly know where things are going from one scene to the next), I expect that we’ll be living in a world where our view of it is through some sort of personal information layer. Near term this is likely to be special goggles or glasses through which digital reality is overlaid on physical reality. More long-term it may well take another form (contacts that put the information more directly into our line of site, retinal implants, attachments to the optic nerve, or even direct brain stimulation) – especially if goggles never make it into the realm of socially acceptable (though I think they probably will, much like headphones are today).

The point being that much of what we see will be an overlay on the physical world that’s made for our personal viewing and not available for the unaided eye of those around us. This is the same argument I’d offer for large holograms on buildings: they just won’t be needed. People will customize the world in ways that they want to, so providing holographic augmentation will be, by and large, superfluous. This could be true of holograms in general. By the time they are ready for mass adoption, we might have already moved into augmented reality by heads-up displays, making the technology moot.

Large Video Displays
As part of the street scene we see outdoor walls covered with large displays showing video. Again, I think that video just attracts too much attention to be a common fixture on the urban landscape. Much like the intrusive advertising we saw in Minority Report, I think people will find it distasteful and it will be a non-starter as a mass-medium device.

Couple that with my point above about augmented reality (which will be pretty advanced 50 years from now) and I think we won’t be seeing outdoor video like this in our future.

Holographic Companion as GPS Device
The narrator indicates that the dolphin (and holographic companions of its ilk) will help us navigate to where ever we want to go. This seems like a far too intrusive way to navigate as a general rule, and a far too specific application to be pointed out in this show. By 2057 we are likely to have myriad ways of navigating which can change depending on our current context and whim. It seems very unlikely that this functionality would coalesce in a single mode like a holographic companion. This isn’t to say that you won’t have a virtual companion (although it’s probably more likely to live in the augmented space of a heads up display (or equivalent) than in the physical space of a hologram), it’s just that such companions aren’t likely to have a primary purpose like guiding you home, and such a function (GPS with navigation) is likely to be mashed up in all sorts of ways.

In-House, Bi-Pedal Robots
Well, everyone is happily predicting the onslaught of domestic robots that are imminently upon us to support aging Baby Boomers. As we’ve followed the kid with the holo-pet home, we’re introduced to his grandfather and then pan around to see a robot that looks very much like the kinds of robots Honda likes to parade about. I myself think we’re still a fair ways from a universal robot that does whatever we need, but even so, I think that this robot looks like something that would be a throwback in 2057. Perhaps that’s what the announcer is about to say, after all, CRT monitors with deep tubes that are practically outmoded today are shown in the background along with a clutter of things that are no-doubt intended to reflect “old” and “quaint”. Perhaps the grandfather is a historian or collector and this robot is part of it.

(Yep, it’s portrayed as a decaying relic – the Asimo -…well there you go.)

3D Screens
So now Physicist Michio Kaku (who I seem to recall really enjoying on Big Thinkers) gives us some words about interacting with 3D characters. He states that our current monitors will seem as outdated to future generations as the horse and buggy are to us. I totally agree with this. However then next segment is about one of the several different 3D computer monitors that have been in the works for the last few years. These certainly could be impactful for us in the next decade, but by 2057 we’ll be 40 years beyond them. I expect we’ll never see anyone sit down in front of something like a computer or screen (as the kid we’ve been following just did) that far in the future. You have to remember that whatever you can point to that’s in the labs today (that may reasonably become part of our lives anytime soon) will be ancient history by 2057. That’s what makes shows like this very difficult to do accurately (though I’m guessing the producers won’t claim that this is anything more than entertaining guesswork). Of course if you believe in an approaching Singularity, well then things will get REALLY interesting by 2057.

Mouse Obsolescence
As part of the segment on 3D displays, Klaus Schenka (sp?) indicates that the computer mouse may be in trouble and demonstrates a peripheral that uses infrared light to track hand movements. I think the days of the mouse are definitely numbered and it will be interesting to see what replaces it. I personally fell that it’s likely to be something with a satisfyingly tactile sense to it. So I’m not enthusiastic about Schenka’s device where you appear to make gestures in empty air. There are interesting things happening with displays that you manipulate by using your hands directly on the display. This seems like it may be the near-term contender to replace the mouse. What lies ahead I’m not entirely sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find infrared tracking going on there somewhere.

Portable Computing
The kid is show interacting with a PDA-sized computer using a stylus. I think we can expect that we’ll not be interacting with computers in this way by 2057. Our computers are definitely going to be small, but our displays are probably not going to be fixed to them, or, at least not in the handheld fashion of modern PDAs. I expect that the stylus will have been long since replaced by a combination of sensors that detect where your attention is focused, and AI routines that recognize your intent.

Likely we will still have the need to type or otherwise directly interact with a computer in order to organize our thoughts in ways that we’ve been using clay tablets, papyrus, paper, pencils, pens, typewriters, and computers for for a couple of millennia, but probably a great deal of our interaction will take place outside of the context of us poking at a small interface with a stylus and will rather take place in some sort of heads up display (as mentioned above) or holographic projections (though I have my doubts on this).

The Pace of Change
I should point out that any vision that I have as an alternate to what is presented by this program is what I expect to happen by 2017, not 2057. While I’m not a Singulatarian in what you might call the “strict” sense, it is definitely plain that the rate of change of technology and the speed that we integrate this into our lives, is continually increasing. The producers of this program have likely chosen a distance quite a ways out in some part because saying that these things will happen in the next 10 years would make many viewers doubt the credibility of the program (more than they might already).

Computer Graphics
A quick note as the holographic shark that the boy is playing with disappears into a wall display of fish. The graphics that people have interacted with so far are very crude. In most cases they don’t even represent the state of the art now. This isn’t terribly surprising given that it would be difficult to create the graphics of tomorrow when the technology hasn’t been built yet today. Perhaps, however, the program would have been better served by picking real video of animals (where possible) and claiming that it was computer generated as that’s likely what the graphics of 2017 will look like. By 2057, we’ll likely be so far beyond what they’re showing that it is difficult to imagine.

Life Extension
I expect we’ll get farther into this later, but after the shark swims away, we’re treated to a brief holographic ad passing by the boy’s window that says “celebrate your 100th birthday on the moon”. Good to see that they’re embracing the idea of radical life extension. It will be interesting to see how radically they think a person’s 100th birthday would be.

Going to the Moon
As for traveling to the moon, it’s not clear to me whether that will be an option or not (if the current energy being poured into privatized space travel is any indication, we’ll likely be able to do that well in advance of 2057 as well), but by 2057 virtual reality should be so convincing feeling (and I mean this for all of our senses) that it will be interesting to see if we spend much time going to actual places at all (human nature seems to indicate that we’ll be going there physically whether we need to or not).

A Laptop?
Not sure yet if this is supposed to be a throwback as with other things, but the kid starts typing into a laptop that looks like any Dell you’d pick up today. Again, we’ll probably have something akin to typing in 2057 (unless we’re totally plugged in by then, which is certainly likely), but even if we do it’s not going to be into anything that looks like a laptop.

Locating Us
A police officer is contacted in her self-driving car and asked her arrival time to work by a co-worker. It may be that this level of ask-and-answer will be required for this kind of interaction, but it will be feasible by 2017 (indeed, is feasible now) that we will have pre-established rules that indicate under what circumstances what groups of people will have access to specific information about us, and, once established, this kind of communication will happen without the need to bother us.

In this case, we can expect that co-workers will have access to our current position and arrival time (assuming that we grant it to them) without ever having to ask us directly.

“Billions of Chips Embedded in the Road”
Michio Kaku makes another appearance to discuss how great it would be to jump into your car, tell it where to go, and not have to touch the steering wheel. (It would be great!) He mentions briefly the idea of having “…billions of chips embedded in the road…”. I know that embedding sensors of various types in the road has been explored as a way of automating driving, but it seems that by 2017 we are unlikely to need this. In an always-connected world with very precise positioning capabilities (both from GPS and dead reckoning), it seems unlikely that we’ll need anything special embedded in the road to tell us where we are, what conditions are like, where obstacles are, etc. Pretty much all of this (and much more) will be done at least as well external to the road itself.

Intelligent Braking Systems
What follows is a section discussing how computers will sense obstacles and brake accordingly, and how they will determine when we are too drowsy to drive. This all seems like things that are already either in the market, or very near being in the market. It is certainly a decent reflection of the state of the art in consumer cars (this section of the program is one of several that show programs going on now that seem futuristic), but barely informs anything interesting of 2017, much less 2057.

The City of the Future Controlled from a Single Point
The narrator discusses how the city of 2057 will be massively interconnected, with all objects transmitting data and everything being controlled by a central point. I certainly agree with the first part of this, but I’m doubtful that everything will be controlled from a single point. (I’m assuming that “everything” means things that would normally fall under responsibilities of a municipal government, and not literally “everything” as a great deal of this “everything” is likely to be under private direction.)

I think it’s reasonably likely that we’ll continue to see a certain amount of centralization in the near term where it makes sense, but longer term (and not MUCH longer) I expect that we’ll start seeing local objects in a city negotiating as required with other objects in their area without the need for central control. This does not mean that they won’t have access to the information from the rest of the city, only that the data won’t go to a central place, and that some sort of central decision maker (computer or human) will be involved in the decision.

Coming Home to the Wired House
The narrator indicates that as soon as you come home lights and temperature (among other things, one assumes) will be adjusted to your preferences. This is a bit of a nit, but at least some of these activities (e.g. temperature) will begin preparing for your arrival well before you get there so that everything is correct by the time you arrive (so you don’t have to come home to a cold house during the winter). In some senses a programmable thermostat can already prepare the temperature in advance of your arrival, but clearly we’re talking about something more flexible than turning on the heat at a certain point of time each day.

This is probably a good time to mention that many things won’t be set to our individual preferences, per se, but will be set to the preferences of all individuals presently in the environment. So the heat may not be as hot as you’d prefer it, but it may be warmer than your spouse prefers. Our environments (and I mean not just our physical environments) will continually adjust themselves in any number of ways to accommodate the ebb and flow of individuals with differing needs.

Cameras and Microphones in the Walls
The narrator describes how devices and structures like walls will have their own microphones and cameras. I think this is unlikely actually, and the pervasive nature of monitoring devices of all sorts will mean that individual devices would not need ones specific to themselves. Of course there are some serious privacy issues to navigate before we get there, so it’s possible (though unlikely) that we’ll see device-specific monitoring equipment instead.

TV Screens
While we hear this description on the program, we see a woman sitting down on a red couch (because what says “the future” better than a red couch?) watching a TV that’s all of 50 inches across (and it appears to be one of those Philips TVs with the “mood lighting” behind it). My TV screen of today is already bigger than this. By 2057 I’d guess that we’d be so far into the realm of virtual reality as media that we’d puzzle a bit about what it must have been like to watch “TV” on a “screen” (but hey, we could always simulate it).

“On Demand” Programming
The narrator goes on to describe how we will be able to call up our favorite TV programs whenever we want. This suddenly sounds like the future world of 2005.

Ordering Items from the Supermarket
Next we’re told that the refrigerator will check to see if it has all of the ingredients for the food we will want to prepare. There are a number of interesting things to think about relating to this.

First, we will probably also get recipes for things that are already in the fridge (again, in the 2017 scenario, although even this is a bit of a time stretch).

More interestingly, however, will be whether or not we are ordering anything physical from a store by 2057. It seems very likely that much of what we will need will be built on the spot using nanotech assemblers of some sort or even less sophisticated technology for less sophisticated products.

Perhaps our relationship to food will change altogether. Indeed by 2057 there is no guarantee that we’ll need food at all if we can change out our body parts for mechanical bits.

Grocery Shopping from your Couch
Uh…HomeGrocer? Peapod? Certainly there have already been attempts at it, and my regional Safeway still does it. Not much of a revelation here.

Your Clothes Will Call an Ambulance
Probably not strictly correct (in that your clothes will provide the feedback and some agent on your behalf will call the ambulance), but definitely a strong possibility by 2017. By 2057 you are likely to be repaired on the spot if you suffer an accident (illness being largely handled proactively at that point).

GPS Locating Free Parking Spots
Minor nit, but it seems a pervasive meme that GPS does work on your behalf aside from providing your location. Your GPS will provide your location. This can be used to locate a you relative to an available parking spot, but it won’t be GPS that does it, it will be an inventory control system at the parking lot, and your computer’s communication with that system that negotiates for it on your behalf.

Now I leave open the possibility that Michio is using this term more loosely to refer to a piece of electronics like today’s GPS Navigation Units, but even that is unlikely to exist as a separate piece of equipment by 2057.

Obsolete Virus Terrorizes City
Our young hero is now turned accidental villain as some hacking tomfoolery on his behalf begins to create pandemonium in the City’s various systems. While trying to hack his pet shark into the City’s ad network using his grandfather’s “obsolete’ laptop, he accidentally lets loose a virus that was lurking on the outdated machine.

Here are a few reasons that I am skeptical of this scenario:
If “obsolete” means what it should, then a virus on that laptop should be incompatible with the City’s systems and just wouldn’t take. That’s kind of like what would happen if a virus existed in an old calculator; their systems are just too different for the virus to get transmitted.
As mischievous as he might be, he’s unlikely to be the first person to try to hack that particular system. Given the number of people who will plunk idly away at hacking whatever system comes their way, and the importance of the City’s system to the large number of people that interact with it, this kind of hacking is very unlikely to succeed. I suspect that they are trying to imply that the old technology is part of the reason that he’s able to slip by the system defenses, but hackers today are already darned crafty, so I’d guess that even this approach would have been tried before or protected against. (Yep, now that I’ve unpaused, the narrator says that the City is not able to defend against this “ancient enemy”.)

Biometric Security
A police officer is shown stating her name and getting a retinal scan in order to get past a secure door. I think biometric identification will have its place in the future, but this kind of security seems like it could be far more easily accomplished with an embedded chip under the skin, or by using your own personal portable computing power to validate your identity (continually, perhaps) and negotiate with the door on the fly using live hashing of some biological identifier or other. No need to stop to talk to the door; just walk right in.

“Intent to Enter” Doors
The police officer and a co-worker walk through a nearby door that senses that they intend to pass through it, and opens automatically. This is the kind of thing that we take for granted in futuristic scenarios (thank you Star Trek), but it’s worth noticing. I actually think that if, for some reason, we tire of opening and closing doors on our own, this scenario is entirely plausible. I expect that either some sensor in the door would have tracked your velocity, and coupled that with statistical models for intent and opened the door for you when a certain probability threshold has been reached.

Perhaps more likely, your own computer (slash-network-slash-whatever) will probably have very accurate models of your historical actions and results, and thus a finer tuned model of your intent (perhaps with additional information, like your schedule, that the door alone won’t have), and will inform the door that you are about to pass through so it had better get its act together and open up.

Making Phone Calls
“I would have called but all of our lines are crashing.” That pesky virus! It’s got us using phone lines again when they’ve been obsolete for almost 30 years! Do bad we aren’t using a loosely coupled network of nodes able to route around problem areas to avoid cascading failures like they’re likely to use in the…uh…future….say, what’s up with that?!?

WHEW! Only 20 minutes into the hour-long program. Perhaps I can manage to keep my comments to a minimum from here on out…

“C’mon Asimo!”
I like how grandpa never came up with anything more clever to call his Asimo than “Asimo”. Reminds me of my daughter who calls her stuffed puppy “puppy”. Perhaps gramps has the one and only original Asimo, but didn’t they make many of them…or rather, aren’t we to presume that in this future’s past many were eventually made?

Fish on the Wall
Just another note on the graphics, with the fish on the wall again. Their behavior and level of detail is inferior to what you can find on a screensaver even now. I wonder if they were supposed to look ancient in this future.

Finger Holographic Communicator
The police officer has been put in charge of determining who set the virus loose on the City. It turns out that – get ready for this – she’s our lad’s MOTHER! She calls home with her fancy finger holographic communicator projector thingy looking for gramps, but getting her boy instead.

It will be interesting to see if we make “calls” to places for much longer. Already a large number of people don’t have home phones, and it seems the trend is only continuing. I’ve already gotten into the habit of calling the number that I know will get me to a person’s personal communication line, rather than to some house where I may get someone else entirely (though that’s certainly not all bad). I expect that officer mom would have called grandpa directly, bypassing the boy altogether. Then again, perhaps gramps is some sort of weird luddite and doesn’t have any fancy new gear despite his penchant for old gear.

To the communications device itself (which is packaged as a stylish half-glove), see the earlier discussion about augmented reality. There’s no sense in everyone seeing your conversation out in the wild. Better yet, have your onboard computing power recognize that you’re looking for gramps and have it start doing so on your behalf.

Magic Pen
Not getting a hold of gramps, and the communications conveniently cutting out when junior tries to confess, officer mom walks over to a computerized table, puts her pen on it, and out comes the bio of grandpa. Apparently something was analyzing her intent and doing work on her behalf. Too bad that doesn’t show up elsewhere.

Sad Segways
Amusingly, as an indicator that the City is being devastated by the virus that junior unwittingly let loose, we see people dragging their Segways about. Interesting that they don’t run on their own like they do now.

Happy Ending
After bringing down an entire city, and nearly getting gramps killed, and mom fired, the only punishment junior gets is a “you rascal” style hair tousling and a hug. I guess we have come a long way after all.