Fifteen years ago last week, Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, created a mundanely dystopian future which has started to feel oddly accurate.Set in Washington, D.C., in the year 2054, the plot details a surveilled and technology-saturated world in which big companies and governments claim to know people better than they know themselves.To create it, Steven Spielberg and the film’s production designer, Alex McDowell, gathered a handful of futurists and asked them to look at the world circa 2000 and extrapolate. A freakish number of their predictions turned out to be right: gestural computer interfaces, invasive advertising, and cities shaped by self-driving cars among them.VICE News talked to those present at the movie’s futurology sessions to ask how they nailed the future — and what the next 15 years will look like.
This segment originally aired June 20, 2017, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.