10 years later, looking back at how 'Minority Report' predicted the future

In the late 90s, when faced with the task of turning Philip K. Dick's The Minority Report into a feature film, director Steven Spielberg assembled a crack team of forward-thinking minds to envision the technology-saturated world to come. The resulting film was an action movie, through and through. But much of what its various collaborators came up with quickly became hauntingly prophetic. From gesture-based computing to police drones to the overwhelming proliferation of personalized advertising, Spielberg's film, in many ways, describes a future that seems to be rapidly closing in on us.

On the occasion of the film's 10th anniversary, Wired recently spoke to a dozen of Spielberg's former soothsayers about how these and other concepts discussed during the film's "idea summit" transitioned from speculation to reality. Among them: Jaron Lanier, virtual reality pioneer and a key figure in the development of Microsoft's Kinect, Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand, and noted futurist Peter Schwartz, who also consulted on notable science fiction films like WarGames.

"We would ask questions: What about advertising? What about transportation? What about newspapers? What about food?" Schwartz recalls. "I don’t think many of us knew what the fuck we were getting ourselves into," says Joel Garreau, at the time a reporter for theWashington Post. Follow the source link below for more on the discussions that gave birth to the film's lasting legacy.