This docu-series covers many individual's ideas of the future, and futurists, but not science to determine what is possible. For instance, bioluminescence requires too much energy from a plant to ever be bright enough to be as functional as what's described. More egregiously, the docu-series completely brushed off VR and focused on novel AR as the future of gaming for the entire episode. Anyone who plays VRChat knows this is not the case. The best parts promised about the future of gaming are here right now in VR, and new advancements are being made every day to make that experience better.
This egregious and insulting omission tinted the episode, biasing it towards something very novel that doesn't match our actual desires, nor our most likely future. Rather than talk with developers who are working to make VR better, who know what people like/dislike about the current technology and what they want to make, the show presents a biased and completely separate track. This issue carries over into many episodes, including an entire episode on the future of houseplants of all things, which includes the aforementioned bioluminescence issue.
I very much love researching the future, even skeptical futures unlikely to happen. But a befitting or better future, this is not. The future of dating is not going to be a magical algorithm better than our current apps... with AR. The future of houseplants is not Avatar, or a plant that "protects you from the rain." We have those in Florida: they don't work! And the future of Gaming, where most people really want to sit down and chill with their international friends, or have fun playing a game together, is not going to be AR!
Let's talk about the dog episode. Any conversation we could ever have is predicated on the intelligence and complexity of a dog's brain, which scientists are surmising are about as intelligent as a two-year-old toddler. They have feelings and thoughts for sure, but not complicated ones. And smarter dogs get bored quickly and fare so much worse in domestic environments. These two facts make the concept of conversing with our pets impossible. While the episode does take care to avoid the notion of dogs sounding like Einstein, the omission of these facts in an entire episode about communicating with dogs is a "plot hole" that looms over the entire episode and swallows it whole. They discuss "problems," for sure, but they never mention the elephant in the room stampeding over the entire room. And with each episode, you find more and more of these elephants which are ignored to allow the series to speculate, speculate, and speculate some more without ever once considering whether or not all that speculation is accurate, or even the kind of future most people want.
The benefits, of course... it's a docu-series about the future. It presents a lot of interviews with people and futurists who all have a very optimistic view of what could be possible and are working hard to make that happen. They ponder the potential problems of such concepts, as though they could be genuine, and I can certainly appreciate the effort to gather such an eclectic group of people to ponder such a ludicrous future. I can certainly watch this series with optimism and suspension of disbelief... but on the inside, it's a tragedy. Or, perhaps, just not the kind of future I'm interested in. If you like pondering the concept of dog communication, Avatar houseplants, and citywide AR, then this is the series for you. But if you are actually responsible for the future and want to know more about the genuine developments that are exciting, this series is not what you're looking for.
This egregious and insulting omission tinted the episode, biasing it towards something very novel that doesn't match our actual desires, nor our most likely future. Rather than talk with developers who are working to make VR better, who know what people like/dislike about the current technology and what they want to make, the show presents a biased and completely separate track. This issue carries over into many episodes, including an entire episode on the future of houseplants of all things, which includes the aforementioned bioluminescence issue.
I very much love researching the future, even skeptical futures unlikely to happen. But a befitting or better future, this is not. The future of dating is not going to be a magical algorithm better than our current apps... with AR. The future of houseplants is not Avatar, or a plant that "protects you from the rain." We have those in Florida: they don't work! And the future of Gaming, where most people really want to sit down and chill with their international friends, or have fun playing a game together, is not going to be AR!
Let's talk about the dog episode. Any conversation we could ever have is predicated on the intelligence and complexity of a dog's brain, which scientists are surmising are about as intelligent as a two-year-old toddler. They have feelings and thoughts for sure, but not complicated ones. And smarter dogs get bored quickly and fare so much worse in domestic environments. These two facts make the concept of conversing with our pets impossible. While the episode does take care to avoid the notion of dogs sounding like Einstein, the omission of these facts in an entire episode about communicating with dogs is a "plot hole" that looms over the entire episode and swallows it whole. They discuss "problems," for sure, but they never mention the elephant in the room stampeding over the entire room. And with each episode, you find more and more of these elephants which are ignored to allow the series to speculate, speculate, and speculate some more without ever once considering whether or not all that speculation is accurate, or even the kind of future most people want.
The benefits, of course... it's a docu-series about the future. It presents a lot of interviews with people and futurists who all have a very optimistic view of what could be possible and are working hard to make that happen. They ponder the potential problems of such concepts, as though they could be genuine, and I can certainly appreciate the effort to gather such an eclectic group of people to ponder such a ludicrous future. I can certainly watch this series with optimism and suspension of disbelief... but on the inside, it's a tragedy. Or, perhaps, just not the kind of future I'm interested in. If you like pondering the concept of dog communication, Avatar houseplants, and citywide AR, then this is the series for you. But if you are actually responsible for the future and want to know more about the genuine developments that are exciting, this series is not what you're looking for.