Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

Couple notes.

* This is a straight conceptual extrapolation of current technology and designs. The only thing that I don't see coming from today's tech is the holographic projects. Oddly, most of the design seems to look like Apple-inspired tech. Does Apple consciously design to look like a sci-fi future? Or do their views of the future become shaped like Apple?

* In the cubes, there are no walls. The cube-dweller did not have headphones. Major, major "graaah"

* There are a ton of animations between slides in the screens. This is a waste of time.

* I didn't see any "stupid" activities like reading Failbook, watching MTV, any of those very popular mental cheetos activities. The future has "stupid" entertainment.

* Transparent fridge door = win. Where do I get one? I like that future!

* Also, one curious thing about this is that this is a presentation of rich people (that's not an indictment). The wealthy people whose houses I've visited who are rich in the US seem to have large amounts of space and everything seems to be insanely tidy (maid service? I don't know). Most less wealthy people have less space and things are a bit more jumbled up and around. This seems to be a conceptualization of a junior executive and her family.

> " There are a ton of animations between slides in the screens. This is a waste of time."*

Given the popularity of iOS and the growing popularity of OSX, I'd argue that most users disagree. Given the direction of Windows 8 it looks like we're getting more animation in the future, not less, and I for one am happy about that. Animation offers important cues as to the nature of the UI and data you're dealing with (the sliding screens of iOS and Android implies a hierarchy without having to waste time/space spelling it out for you, for example).

In any case, the MSFT video bothered me when I first saw it in a way that I couldn't really place, but after thinking about it some, I think my problem is this:

What is all of this utopian future-tech going to do for, well, regular people? The woman in the video is clearly very wealthy - I mean hell, her hotel has someone just standing around waiting for her cab from the airport. Her (presumable) husband and child live in a home far larger and more luxurious than anything my sorry middle-class ass grew up with. It feels... elitist.

Yeah okay, so jetsetting VPs and rich people have some sweet-ass tech in the future... but where is the technology for the everyman? I'd much rather watch/read about what technology of the future will do for everyone, not just the minted upper-class. Maybe it's just the economy we've had recently, but the video feels slightly repulsive in the fact that their vision of future technology apparently has no middle-class people, or indeed, middle-class concerns.

Is technology between the upper class and middle class really that different? Don't plenty of middle class people have high-end smartphones today?

That's a good point - in the present technology between the upper and middle classes aren't that different, but in the video it sure as hell looks that way.

Hyper-productive terminals for the creative class? What about industry? What about people working more mundane jobs instead of some future-eco-glamor-green-creative one? What will this crazy utopia-tech do for them?

I wish they spent at least a few more seconds looking at what this crazy utopia-tech does for the cab driver, or the bellhop, or the grocery store where the husband/daughter have to get their food from. Because right now it's a video of "what can future technology do for executives and her highly-paid future-eco-green-creative direct reports who work on ephemeral things that don't seem to have the slightest connection to reality".

There were so many opportunities here to explore what this tech will do to improve the lives of, well, the majority, but all of it was spent strictly on the upper-class, and that bothers me a bit. Even right now, the majority of the world doesn't work in a chic, well-appointed office. The majority doesn't fly around the world constantly...

First of all-- the technology was shown helping the bellhop in the microsoft video.

My friend works in a warehouse. It's not glamorous, and it's refrigerated, so it's maybe 40 F the whole time. A lot of the warehouse is automated, so he spends most of his time making sure that the equipment is doing what it needs to be doing. So, just one more anecdote about how technology is becoming a part of blue-collar work.

Oh, I'm well aware that technology has pervaded all walks of life - that's kind of my main beef with this video. It seems to wrap itself up entirely in this mythical environmental-engineering company, along with the very wealthy denizens of it, as if that will be the bulk, or even the theme of the world in the future... and in the end come off as rather sterile and soulless.

More interesting than whiz-bang animations of fictitious (and fantastical) office workflows IMO, would be electronic payments for the cab - imagine the woman stepping out of the taxi and seeing the cab cost, along with (something futuristic!) "submitted to expense account" or something. Or, say, traffic overlays on the windshield for the cab driver. Or for the bellhop, something more substantial than how much the guest's bags weigh (really?)

I'm having trouble distilling my thoughts on this - I guess I was expecting to see more problem-solving in a vision of the future rather than a whole lot of whiz-bang animations that look cool but are of dubious use... and solve previous few problems that are compelling.

This is produced by the Office division though - office workflows are kinda their thing.

What more substantial info does the bellhop need? One of the problems with displays of numbers like that is that they are mostly a curiosity unless something breaks, then what you need to see is whatever indicators of brokenness are relevent to identifying and fixing it. And not much is going to break there unless she arrives at a different time or is moved to another room. A future full of attention grabbing displays of data just because we can is not utopian.

Perhaps the cab cost submitted to the expense account happened behind the scenes - why would she need to be alerted about it at all? I imagine the cab was pre-paid by whichever of her staff planned the trip, or provided by the hotel. We don't know, but if this is a display of techno-efficiency around her trip, she doesn't need to know or care either. On problem solving, it takes loading a dataset into a brain and then time thinking about it; it can't really be shown on a slick video and it doesn't need a particularly futuristic office except to the extent that we see people looking at screens of data/information. "A smaller pump would be more efficient"? As if the software which calculated that needed two people physically meeting to say so.

By necessity, a video like this can't display happenings which don't fit video as a format, and that seems to me to be a lot of everyday life experiences on the smallest scales.

As you have correctly noted, there is NO below-class in this vision (well maybe except hotel concierge).

We may only imagine how we might arrive to such future.

As you have correctly noted, there is NO below-class in this vision (well maybe except hotel concierge).

There was also the video-beggar in the subway station. Which struck me as extremely cynical.

> There are a ton of animations between slides in the screens. This is a waste of time.

If you make them fast enough but still visible they help a lot in showing the context. They can add some metadata which would be worse to explain otherwise. Of course there are also cases where they are flashy and waste time...

> those very popular mental cheetos activities

It's the first time I see this expression, but I'm afraid I have to steal and use it from now on. I love the comparison.

> * In the cubes, there are no walls. The cube-dweller did not have headphones. Major, major "graaah"

Directional sound[1] tech is making leaps and bounds.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_from_ultrasound

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