Microsoft's Vision Of The Future: You Will Be Productive Or You Will Be Assimilated

Okay, so they really don't mention the second part, but I think it's obvious.

In this sad vision of the future, everything you do operates on the goal of maximizing productivity and ultimately profit. Everyone lacks emotion due to their flouridation treatments which you'll notice keep their teeth very white.

You can rest assure everything you do is being monitored, for your benefit of course. I'm sure at this point most of the world is concrete and asphault, so I'm suprised they didn't show the holographic trees.

My conclusion from that video is that they envision a future where technology has come so far that it's basically magic. Though I guarantee you that half the people that woman interacted with were androids.

reply to post by v1rtu0s0


That was the dullest promotional vid I've ever seen, I thought it might be a promotional vid for the medical industry - so sanitized.......and at 6mins far too long. The music reminded me of the soundtrack to the film moon, just not as good (actually no where near as good - whoever did the sound design would have been vaporised in the future the vid predicts.

Remember, its Microsoft so all that tech probably wont work properly anyway and/or will be riddled with viruses, spy-ware, porn diallers et al....

reply to post by v1rtu0s0


It looks like a pretty good future to me...

Isn't it just like now, except that their gadgets seem to work a little better than ours?

reply to post by v1rtu0s0


Ah, you posted this thread right after I have seen Kurtzweil speak about the singularity. Kurtzweil can be taken with a grain of salt. But for better or worse, this is where we are heading as a people. We are going to, and we are now, joining with this technology that we have created and I believe that never the twain shall be separated again.

So I gather from your OP that you see this as a bad thing; that we are only headed for more subjugation as our handlers find better ways to use up our time. Problem is that we created all of this because we wanted it and it is our destiny. Our responsibility is to make sure that our destiny is not hijacked. It is up to us to make sure that this destiny of ours with the machines and technology is not used against us.

In fact I think that is the most critical thing happening in the world right now and it has been since the beginning of The Epoch of Unix. No good product of human ingenuity and invention has ever gone unchallenged. Think about it. There is something in our nature that wants turn anything useful and uplifting in to something harmful and degrading. I used to think that this was some other entitiy or entities doing this to us, what we all might call TPTB. But I have found that it is not. It is us. Weaponized against ourselves.

It is up to us that we do not enslave ourselves and allow ourselves to be enslaved by what we have created. This doesn't have to go to a bad place. But it is going to that place so we had better pay attention.

Apparently this vision will occur and it will reduce our ability to express emotions.

Fast forward 10 million years...

We are exploring the galaxy and discover this strange species called humans. They have these strange things called emotions. We must study them....

Agreed, sad times if the future means wafer thin things you need to slide your fingers all over. And not just a few things - every-things. I can't be arsed with that. Or a technological world for that matter. Interesting promo vid, but it just makes me cringe. I don't need life to be like a sci-fi movie for it to be a good life.

From that though, I do like the 3D architect stuff they were showing (kind of). And I definitely want that hologram woman machine from The Sixth Day.

Those devices would have to be powered by energy from the environment.
That means all these companies will have to shutdown first, before we have a future like that..

www.interstatebatteries.com
www.duracell.com
www.energizer.com
www.usbcell.com
www.maxell.com
www.rayovac.com
www.eemb.com
www.concordebattery.com
www.lenmar.com
www.hepi.com
www.battery-biz.com
www.sanyobatteries.net
www.enableipc.com
www.sanikbattery.com
www.innergypower.com
www.electrofuel.com
www.magnacharge.com
www.suppo.com
www.kendoo.com
www.propower.co.kr

We all know fat cats don't go down without scratching..

Originally posted by Frater210
reply to post by v1rtu0s0

 

Problem is that we created all of this because we wanted it and it is our destiny. Our responsibility is to make sure that our destiny is not hijacked. It is up to us to make sure that this destiny of ours with the machines and technology is not used against us.

It is up to us that we do not enslave ourselves and allow ourselves to be enslaved by what we have created. This doesn't have to go to a bad place. But it is going to that place so we had better pay attention.

edit on 30-10-2011 by Frater210 because: .

Completely disagree with your two statements.... When you say "We have created all of this because we wanted it"...? eh? Think about how capitalism works - who owns the means of production decides the direction technology goes in. "We" are the sheeple who consume the endless crap "they" come out with. Its like the argument that trashy celebrity obsessed magazines use - if there wasn't a market for it then they wouldn't publish it...or the vast budgets of the military that get used to design exotic weapons for killing....Turn both of those ideas round and put all of that energy and money into helping the human race evolve instead of de-volve..never going to happen... yeah im to idealistic but realise I have no power to change the macro level - nor do you, unless you are one of them and then you experience hegemony and become like them anyway...

And yeah "It is up to us that we do not enslave ourselves and allow ourselves to be enslaved by what we have created." however, I think you will find yourself in the minority, like me and be labelled by the thought police as a terrorist etc...

i dont want to live in a world where microsoft is behind everything...they can't even secure their own software or security... reminds me of the southpart movie where windows 98 is running the pentagon and the guy shoots bill gates for being such an idiot llmao "F#CKING WINDOWS 98"

maybe a world run by linux... oh wait it already is lmao everything worth while uses linux even microsoft uses linux servers for stuff which is great.. oh and linux is FREE!!!! imagine that.

This looks like a future for the rich here. I am sure with all this technology comes a pretty hefty price tag. When we get new and improved things to help us not all of us get the benefit. I don't own a smart phone or an ipad because i can't afford it. Sure I would love an eletric car about is $20,000 out of my price range. I may get to benefit from these products much later but I doubt the poor will have all this stuff. If we create technology so great there will be a huge gap between the rich and poor.(sure there is already but it would be worse.) This means that the poor will live back in the 1990s technology while the rich get all the advance technology. I would say for me technology in my world is the same as it was in the late 1990s. My internet is about the same as what I had in 1998. My computer is still a 30 lb box. Flat screen Tvs were around in the 1990s but I did not have one until 2006.
My car, my housing, my phone and my way of life is not much different from 1998. These technologies won't suddenly leap me forward into the future. Anyways great ideas but they need to make them inexpensive. After all LCD TVs are still too high in price it is easier to make something less expensive upfront then to wait for the prices to go down.
Is it really that the parts they use are so espensive or is it simple coperate greed?

Screens are going to make reality obsolete, because they are more economic and efficient.

Anyone else find that quite depressing? i think its something to do with all of the touch screens or is that all we are going to have in the future?

If that's the future, it sucks. Unless they make a time machine to go back in time, when we used to drink and eat natural. I don't want a touch screen pie, like the guy in the video.

All the people in the video look standarized. No fats, olds or uglies. No blue necks neither. GMO people?

Here is the same message,
untranslated
in the original geek-lish.

Sounds like the perfect system for use by conspiracy theorists to me.

But then I'm a Bill Gates fanboy, so I may be prejudiced.

It's like that "on star" system in some cars.
If the government had forced it on us as surveillance,
we would have hated it.
But if we can have the same technology, except it works _for_ us
then we love it.

What I saw in the commercial in the opening post was
another advance in surveillance tech
but one for use by us
not one to be used on us.
And that's all the difference in the world.


David Grouchy

The tech lover in me is like OH MY GOD I WANT ALL THOSE THINGS!!!!!!!!!!

The human nature loving side of me is like "UNPLUG YOURSELF, PLEASE!!!!!!!"

so torn. I LOVE LOVE LOVE tech and playing with new things that help life be easier but then again, we did just fine in the old days pre computer/tech and did work with our hands, sweat and back breaking work, and still had time to come in around dusk and spend time playing board games or telling stories by candle light (Talking early 1900's and before) Heck even up to the 80's, we still did things manually and physically and maybe enjoyed time off with a new amazing walkman. O_o

I think the emphasis of my reply is a simple concept becoming simply lost: unplug, enjoy life. you. others.

the day my old room mate called my mobile phone while I was in my bedroom and asked me a question - while he was IN HIS BEDROOM across the hall made me go 'what the heck is the world coming to?' No wonder we're getting fat and stuff. Why do anything anymore when you got it at the literal touch of a finger?

Just about everything in that video has been in the prototype stages or is an expansion of existing concepts onto these prototype technologies.

Quantum Dot LED technology (covered in a display technologies thread I started a while back in this forum) is an expansion of OLED technology - which allows for paper-thin, transparent displays shown in the promo. Glasses with cameras capable of translating foreign languages and displaying it on the lenses have been around for some time (prototypes of that have been around since early 2002 or so). You can already use your cell phone for Augmented Reality displays (where the hotel is outlined and a caption placed above it), as well as making a number of purchases, donations, etc.

The reading pad could be accomplished with an E-ink display under a QDLED display (though they are likely exaggerating our ability to shrink batteries and processing circuitry).

Really, though, people have to understand who Microsoft is marketing to, and for what. The productivity and travel end of things is aimed at businesses and people who frequently travel on business. Just in my traveling with the Military - it sucks royally to get off of a plane at all-hours of creation and find that you can't read or understand half of what is around you, and you have to be at a place you've never been to by 6 in the morning (after finding a place to sleep that you have, also, never been to).

I'm surprised they didn't show hospitals in this... as they are, currently, one of the best examples of data integration and personal/portable data devices and their utility.

They also are marketing to business by showing an ease of the practical applications of technology - cost/effect analysis, clean interfaces between different departments, etc.

The home environment they have at the end is more cutsey-poo than anything. It's more of a "imagine if" sort of thing, rather than "this is what we are aiming for."

I don't really understand why people are criticizing a "lack of emotion." But, there again, I find most of the people on these forums to be very vexing cases of insanity

Quick question, is it me or is the Microsoft website down 99% of the year ?

Why can I never visit Microsoft.com or the support pages - am I cursed? Have they changed domain and not told anyone? Always the same, "Firefox can't find the server at support.microsoft.com."

this is what i think of bill gates and microsoft



a little bit of humility pie.

I think it's a consumer issue. They're marketing to consumers, showing consumers interacting with other consumers about consumeables i.e. products/services. Even the mother-child scene is an interaction about consuming. There's a heart as symbolism which appears on the frig, a hub for consuming. It is depressing.