- What happens when science fiction becomes science fact?
(upbeat electronic music)
I recently went to Dragon Con, the huge convention
that caters to fans of fantasy video games,
comic books, horror, and science fiction.
One of my favorite things to do is to look
at all the amazing costumes where people have brought
those science fiction gear and gadgets into real life,
which made me think, I should do an episode
about real cases of sci fi becoming sci fact.
Number five, the Star Trek tricorder.
In the Star Trek universe, the tricorder is a sensor array
that can do pretty much anything, but its most important
function is helping Doctor McCoy diagnose crew members.
In reality, the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE
promises a 10 million dollar reward for the team
that can build a working tricorder.
The competition has been whittled down to 10 teams,
including Scanadu, which recently held
a wildly successful crowd-funding project
for its product the Scanadu Scout,
kind of a tricorder junior.
Number four, exoskeletons.
In the comics, Tony Stark has to make
the Iron Man suit out of necessity.
In reality there are a lot of companies
making exoskeletons for various reasons,
like Ekso Bionics, which is building
exoskeletons for paralysis patients.
The exoskeleton supports the patient's weight
and they control it by using buttons and clutches
or a walker, or even by thrusting their weight forward,
causing the exoskeleton to walk.
Number three, you know what, no series in the history
of mankind has given us more crazy
gadgets and vehicles than James Bond.
In Tomorrow Never Dies, the villain has a C-drill,
which is essentially a torpedo with a drill bit
in the front of it that he uses to sink ships.
Now, the Nautilus mining company's deep-sea bed cutter
would give 007 nightmares, but it's not meant
to interrogate super spies, it's a deep sea mining apparatus
meant to get gold and copper from deep under the ocean.
Number two, you can't have any discussion
about science fiction and science reality
without bringing up Minority Report.
When you watch John Anderton swipe stuff off the screen
or re-size images by moving his hands apart
or together, you can't help but feel the movie
really predicted how user interfaces would look
in the near future, and if you want to turn
your own PC into a Minority Report user interface,
you can use a gadget like the Leap Motion Controller,
which just plugs right into your USB port.
Number one, Skynet.
Okay, so this one's creepy.
In the Terminator series, Skynet is a computer network
that gains self awareness and decides that we people
are pesky critters that need to be terminated.
In reality, we are years, if not decades
away from any machine that could be self-aware,
but we already are seeing machines
capable of teaching other machines.
At Cornell University, a group of researchers
have created the robo-brain.
What's the purpose of this robo-brain?
It's to teach robots basic things
like how to complete tasks, or what an object is
and how it interacts with its environment.
So a future robot designer can really concentrate
on the form factor of their robot
and not worry so much about the AI back end.
What I love about this is there's a cyclical
relationship between science fiction and reality.
Science fiction authors come up with amazing stories
that inspire engineers and scientists
to bring that into reality.
Then new science fiction authors look at the current
amazing work and build even more phenomenal stories
in the future, and we all stand to benefit.
I have a question for all of you this week.
Which idea in science fiction do you think
is the next one to enter reality?
I want to hear your thoughts and your explanations
in the comments below.
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(upbeat electronic music)