2001, A Space Odessey : the nightmare of touch-screen-less future

Buttons everywhere. Where the heck are the touchscreens ?

Well. Sometimes you just want to watch some old movie. That’s exactly what happened to me tonight : all I wanted to do is to watch 1968 Kubrick’s 2001, A Space Odyssey. And guess what ? That’s what I just did.

No need to tell how much I love that masterpiece. However, something has changed since the last time I watched that movie, which was years earlier.

As I watched the 160 minutes movie, something was badly missing (in scenes like here and here) : touch screens. In the movie, people used buttons and their own voices to send commands to equipments, not the screens. That’s not the way we would imagine the future, in the iPhone era.

Of course, it’s NOT Kubrick’s job to exactly predict the future would be. But the movie gives us the chance to witness how deep we are diving into the future, faster and faster.

Sure, we don’t book flights to the Moon yet, but we can do video calls with phones half a centimeter thin. Even Hal 9000, we got that too in a wide range of smartphones (well, sort of. Siri and other Siri-style ‘assistants’ are not built into the smartphones since they rely on servers to interpret users requests and to deliver them with the appropriate answers. What I might compare to HAL 9000 though, is IBM’s Watson).

Nowadays, we have Google Now, Google Glass, Facebook Home (like it or not, it IS changing the way we communicate with each other) and ‘Assistants,’ to name a few, all packed in handheld phones !

Pretty awesome.

In the other hand, Stanley Kubrick somehow managed to successfully ‘predict’ tablets (watch it here), a game changer in the world of high-tech.

No matter what, I loved and still love 2001, A Space Odyssey.

END OF FILE