Microsoft Shows What The Future Will Look Like

Posted by JacobSloan on October 28, 2011

Microsoft has released this “positive” (hear the cheery music?) thought-exercise short film titled “Productivity Future Video” which shows “how future technology will help people make better use of their time, focus their attention, and strengthen relationships while getting things done at work, home, and on the go.”

It’s an affluent, depressing world in which every surface has been turned into a screen with notifications telling you what do or think, interpersonal relations have completely atrophied, and emotions and sensation are muted as one is shuttled between airports, hotels, and other highly-planned spaces. Just wait until everything around you, the walls and the floor the table, is a Microsoft product with malfunctioning software.

Posted in: Computers, Future, Futurism, Information, information overload, information technology, Microsoft, Technology, Video

jakob jones

“Swallowing
half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a
quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.”
jakob jones

“Swallowing
half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a
quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.”
jakob jones

“Swallowing
half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a
quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.”
jakob jones

“Swallowing
half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a
quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds.”
Anonymous

Apparently the whole world of the future resembles a modern hospital. Sterile, dead, secure. Nature no longer exists either, except of course on your favorite view screen or accent wallpaper. Apparently everyone in the future is docile and bonded to technology like a fucking cyborg. A beautiful world of cement and re-bar, walled off from all that grows. Stuck, moving in a dizzy little circles and figure eights running to and fro, accomplishing nothing.
The silence and peace of NOW absorbed into quiet but insistent little reminders to be whatever the screen says you should be. Go where the screen says to go and when it says to go there. Think what the screen says to think.

You are now a well organized sock drawer. An immaculate conceptual conception. The world resonates audible but invisible white noise for your mind. This is freedom. This is the Future. Welcome to hell ……Microsoft style..
Mr Willow

A superb assessment!

Could not have said it better.
ChristianHypocrite

And the symbols of cannabis and anything remotely psychedelic has finally been censored and purged, and anyone clinging to those symbols has the bad flag associated to them. It will be a glorious future of perfect control, service to your betters, and guaranteed productivislavery.
Anti-Citizen1

Sounds like something I would say, but slightly more eloquent. Bravo.
Mr Willow

Isn’t it ironic that while we strive to have all our machines smarter, we make ourselves like machines?
Blakenurmandy

When you watch your walls, they’ll watch back.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Bruce-Miller/100000952005408 Bruce Miller

Folks in the “Real World”, a group rising in number at an alarming rate, as the “American Dream” disintegrates before the world’s eyes, seek Gobar Gas for their Hoover-villes this winter! The distance between the Great American propaganda Whores’ reality and life on the streets of America today grows! This piece of nonsense shows the disparity very clearly! Even as we load Ubuntu, for free, from the net, onto used computers, and steal Wi-Fi wherever possible, for lack of funds, and dumpster dive for lunch, collect pop-cans for food, hole up in cheap boarding houses for shelter, or even under bridges, in hovels tent cities, fully disenfranchised now, taking occasional work wherever possible, this Capitalist /Corporatist nonsense seems so alien!
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_ZGM2JWSQQN3MBE7FBT2M22RLG4 golchab

i didn’t see one “you need to install these updates!” annoyance on this film. lies.
http://hormeticminds.blogspot.com/ Chaorder Gradient

These techno-idealists; These Future-Fix fetishists. This is nothing more than an advertising campaign, promising more lies for the future, that will be laughed at in 50 years assuming digital technology still exists something like its current form. There are so many nonsense hypocrisies here If meetings are so easy to be done over the techno-world, why is the mommy flying all the way across the country for a flesh and blood meeting (Maybe microsoft presumes we solve the energy crisis?).

My favorite part of the video was epitomized by the paragraph the data-lackey was typing:

“While working with the data from our Mycorrhizal studies, we discovered that the reduction in the water consumption of the plants allowed for a smaller and more energy efficient water pump.”

This being written seconds after the COMPUTER “discovered” this. The human in the equation removes himself here, because in reality, his last line of worth would to make the judgement that, sure maybe we can be more efficient, but maybe the plants benefit from additional water rather than saving a couple bucks for maximum efficiency. I think there comes a time when the boss says “do we really need the guy to mess around on computers, i’m pretty sure the computer can narrow 3 choices down to 1, considering it just analyzed data spanning the entire world in a matter of second”
Anti-Citizen1

Their world will exist, in walled cities defended by private military contractors, while the rest of us scrape by on less and less, as their pollution corrodes the natural world and the health of the land, making it harder and harder to grow food, while their imperialist thugs come and steal resources and food at gunpoint. This future brought to you by right libertarianism/anarcho capitalism.

I volunteer for the resistance now, anyone else? We need working knowledge of firearms, electronics, and a fiery revolutionary spirit.
Anti-Citizen1

Brings a whole new meaning to “the walls have ears”.
Anti-Citizen1

It’s really a sad cycle of co-dependence, in which we give more and more of our world to them, and we become dependent on them for just about everything.
Josehasing

This is the world I do not wish to live in, Everything looks so empty technology is taking over the world we are being taking over by robots
Anti-Citizen1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbXllqj-hUA Resident Anti-Hero spins some truth.
Anonymous

Consult the extensive and insightful works of Isaac Asimov……
Adaugeo

Let’s see the scene if the cars or planes were loaded with a version of Vista? Airbags and alternatively when those fail as well, body bags by Microsoft.
Mr Willow

I was more referring to the methods by which society functions and how we relate to one another than how much of our lives are driven by technology.

It was more a remark in the vein of GoodDoktor up at the top. While we are certainly dependent upon technology—and probably more than is healthy—there is a constant drive to make technology smarter and more human-like. To put it in slightly more Biblical terms: Man made machine in His own image. The first thing people want out of any piece of technology is relateability, they want it to either have the voice or appearance of a human, because it makes any sort of interface easier to work with if you don’t have to talk to it in ones and zeros or stare at something resembling a face instead of a screen (holographic projections in science fiction movies, for example, are generally portrayed as anthropomorphic). They are always concerned with stripping the impersonality out of machines, or imbuing them with a semblance of sentience, where, even if you are looking at graphs or text, you can just speak directly to the artificial construct, and it will conduct itself in a life-like manner depending on what you say. (think Jarvis from Iron Man)

And yet, in integrating this manner of technology and machinery into the world around us—even going so far as implanting it directly into our flesh—we are constantly being divorced from the natural world—preferring instead an artificial world we have created and can (presumably) control—and alienated from one another. It’s making it to where the majority of our interaction has to be conveyed through the middle-man of technology. And of course, then, we begin to order ourselves as if we are computers. Compartmentalise every aspect of our lives, we aren’t allowed to be spontaneous because that would be like a glitch in the system (as if we were suddenly a 2 in binary), and in most respects we are governed we are governed by numbers instead of any manner of feeling or reason.

No, we couldn’t do this or that or the other thing because it doesn’t fit in with the projections, or the graphs, or we ran a simulation and that course of action wouldn’t work out, so rather than attempt it and reason out methods by which any course of action could work or should work—in the face of orthodoxy even—we should all just listen to the computers because they are our highest ideals. After all, we made them in our image.
DeepCough

Peh, same shit, different decade.
Raz

And in the future everyone will buy useless gadgets from microsoft (not apple)!!
Anti-Citizen1

Well that is really a much more elaborate explanation of my point, as we become more and more alienated from the natural world, the world that birthed us, that our morphologies are still adapted to(for the most part), we become more and more, on an individual level, dependent on machines and technology, so much so that most people, or at least a very large portion of society, does not even know how to prepare food for itself, let alone grow it anymore, it is dependent on machinery, automation and computerization for almost everything.

The ultimate slavery society, but at the same time, these machines people have built, they are dependent on energy, and resources and maintenance, at this time mostly administered by humans. And because of this co dependence, we are locked in. If the techno culture, the machines, were to be dismantled or destroyed, thousands, even millions, would likely die. So it must be continued, it must be defended, even though it destroys freedom, destroys wilderness, destroys life itself, so many people have allowed themselves or even sought to stake their very survival on this machinery of death and destruction, that they will kill for it. They become servants of the machines, the way the machines were built to be servants for them.

One could almost view the machines as a form of death incarnate, as if they were a malevolent force seeking some sort of life of their own, at the expense of all other life, and we are being unwittingly used to bring it to maturation. It will incorporate those that it can use and abandon or destroy those that it can’t. You could say it was all human volition, but is it really? What pushes at the back of the minds of those that would forsake all that is alive for things that aren’t? Who’s really in charge?
Anonymous

Never fired a gun before, but I know what a bottle + gasoline + rag + match = …. I’m down for a fiery revolution!
Reptoids

What a cacophony of gadgets.
http://www.facebook.com/chinagreenelvis Eric Vinyard

This video is excruciatingly boring.

The funniest part of it is that the people in it still need physical, flat surfaces to interact with, but in the future we will have no need for them at all. Our “keyboards” will be nothing but an intangible connectivity between our thought processes and the augmented reality overlay we see either through our glasses, contact lenses, or, eventually, hard-wired into our brains. We already carry Internet access around with us through our phones; the next step is channeling the visuals straight to our eyeballs instead of having to bother with 3×4 inch screens.
Al

This world looks like this same shitty world we live in but with more electronic toys to play with. The sick warped and twisted ideas and values of the culture have to be eradicated and or reassessed to move toward a scientific sustainability paradigm free of the irrelevance as depicted in this video.
Al

This world looks like this same shitty world we live in but with more electronic toys to play with. The sick warped and twisted ideas and values of the culture have to be eradicated and or reassessed to move toward a scientific sustainability paradigm free of the irrelevance as depicted in this video.
Anti-Citizen1

Well, they aren’t too complicated.
Ljhurzel

i would like to make the point here that the expansion of technology isn’t what will ruin civilization in the future, people who think like you will.
The Chariot

No automatic cars? I don’t think people are going to want to waste time driving on boring roads in their morning commutes when the future comes. I imagine people would have more options besides taxi driver with all the information available in the so called future (I still like motor sports tho for the enthusiasts). Microsoft got it all wrong, this is just a smart phone and
fantastic modern corporate achitecture commercial. At the rate that natural disasters are happening, cities will have to contour the land and adapt to the natural landscape, weather conditions and seismic activity instead of cutting through everthing trying to make the earth adapt to buildings and rebuilding when it happens (costs so much money, men hours and precious time). As we can see currently in Bangkok, built on a flood plain without building codes to at least have higher foundations to keep living spaces elevated. As the good doktor mentioned with his very nice piece of short writing ”IT GOTS TO BE GREEN”
Anti-Citizen1

Okay idiot, a vastly over simplistic argument with no context or analysis of the effects of technology on society or the global ecosphere has bested me, I will now submit to your enlightened worldview and be a happy drone forever.
Jim

I prefer the Android future myself. I would like to be one of the first ones to take it’s head off with a baseball bat before they are given rights. How about dropping an android off a roof like Letterman does with fruit and stuff and see it get up. That would be hilarious! Microsoft’s version of the future is boring and not very funny at all! Androids have a great potential to be funny and more useful perhaps in the future. I woulndt mind an android to clean the house tell you the truth.
LM

Endless smooth, flat surfaces…and not a fingerprint in sight.
E.B. Wolf

Indeed. This place seems to have all the depth and soul of the jingle that accompanies it.

For some unknown reason that tune gives me an overwhelming craving for my Psalm 69 album and a shotgun.
E.B. Wolf

Indeed. This place seems to have all the depth and soul of the jingle that accompanies it.

For some unknown reason that tune gives me an overwhelming craving for my Psalm 69 album and a shotgun.
E.B. Wolf

Add a dash of liquid dish detergent or similar substance for the sticky factor. Otherwise, the gas burns away too quickly.
E.B. Wolf

Add a dash of liquid dish detergent or similar substance for the sticky factor. Otherwise, the gas burns away too quickly.
Happypedro

Where’s the natural world? You know, trees, animals, rivers, etc? This mentality reveals no real reflection on, respect for, or dialog with the environment which provides all the resources to make these technologies possible. No discussion of how inventing the train (generally a good thing) also brought with it the invention of the train wreck. And where’s the valuing of such things as deep/direct democracy? This video is largely about gadgets and superficial options…
Calypso

Oh look it’s a sock puppet! AC you better STFU methinks you’ve been tagged as an enemy of freedom.
Happypedro

Technology isn’t inherently good or bad, but the overemphasis on technology at the expense of the natural world, and the advancing technologically without sufficient reflection on the ethics of it (which we don’t get enough of; we mostly just barrel ahead), is not good. Neil Postman’s book “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology” warns of the tyranny of Technopoly – a self-justifying, self-perpetuating system wherein technology of every kind is cheerfully granted sovereignty over social institutions and national life. And, I would argue, all too often justifying domination of all sorts, particularly over the natural world (by viewing it in terms of utility rather than having intrinsic value). This technopoly has transformed us from ones who use technology to beings who are shaped by it, and it is important, it seems to me, for these reasons and many more, to place technology first and foremost within the context of our larger human goals and social values. Which this video does not come anywhere close to touching upon. It’s simply a glorification of technopoly placed in a marketing video, which feels more like propaganda than visionary thinking.
http://www.facebook.com/davidmendez01 David Méndez

Nice technology! Why is everyone still wearing glasses?
http://crnchy.com/ Cool Men Gear

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Microsoft Shows What The Future Will Look Like

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