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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

For those that haven't seen it, here's the scene where all the digital signage knows who John Anderton is: https://youtu.be/7bXJ_obaiYQ

The movie was released in 2002, so fairly prescient.

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"Your video will play after this ad" oh the irony

A targeted ad nonetheless. Irony indeed.

I thought of the film as well. I think we should remember that for all the cool cars in the setting, it was meant to be dystopian.

Dystopian? I think it was meant to desensitize people to the point of acceptance.

Besides the movie's premise of psychic surveillance using disabled people and indefinite detention of pre-perpetrators, there was plenty of dystopian elements in that movie, even if the future wasn't specifically a dystopia. The spider bots, the vomit sticks, and the ads:

Spielberg: "The Internet is watching us now. If they want to. they can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we're part of the medium. The scary thing us, we'll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us."

http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/spielberg-and-cruise-an...

It wasn't that prescient; public-location commercial facial recognition system had been deployed for several years, and companies were, IIRC, already actively promoting customer tracking and advertising applications at the time.

It was rare, bulky, expensive, slow, and highly inaccurate at the time.

http://www.enterstageright.com/archive/articles/0102/0102fac...

It's worth noting the 2002 movie Minority Report is based on a shorty story of the same name published by Philip K. Dick in 1956.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Minority_Report

I was attributing this bit to the film...I suspect the digital signage scene wasn't from the short story.

Ah, right, yep good point. I've read the story but my memory of the film overwhelms my memory of the story. I believe you are correct.

Yeah, the short story was very little like the film.

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