Why Minority Report was spot on | Technology | The Guardian

In predicting the future, Spielberg’s Minority Report helped to shape it:

What Spielberg didn’t count on, though, is what might be called “the Star Trek effect”. If you show off imaginary cool technology in a film or TV series, then kids, teenagers and enthusiastic technologists of all ages will try their damnedest to make it come true. When James T Kirk beamed down to an alien planet and flipped open his communicator, when Spock waved his tricorder over strange life forms and murmured “intriguing …”, when the crew of the Enterprise teleported, carried phasers, communicated with their computer by voice and carried data around on little plastic sticks, a generation looked at it and thought: that’s a future I want to live in.

What the article doesn’t mention is that when Spielberg was making this film, he consulted with a team of eminent “futurologists” to develop a compelling vision of the future. More on that here.