Opinion | The coronavirus pandemic may seed the next big thing in tech – and you’ll never guess what it is
- There is little doubt that the pace of truly original new inventions has slowed, even if the application of existing ones has accelerated
- Bill Gates warned of a global pandemic five years ago but at Microsoft he was slow to recognise the internet and repeated the same mistake years later
One of the benefits of spending a lot of time at home during the pandemic is the chance to catch up on viewing. Most people are binge-watching Netflix but thanks to the generosity of my local cable provider, all the premium movie channels have been made available for free during the current period.
I’ve been able to catch up on a couple of cult sci-fi movies from the 1990s that depicted a dystopian 21st century. It has been fun watching how Hollywood perceives future technology.
In Escape from LA (1996), the Snake Plissken character played by Kurt Russell carries a doomsday device that stores vital data on a miniature version of the CD-ROM. The concept of digital solid state storage – aka the thumbdrive, now cloud storage – was not foreseen – even as late as the mid 90s.
In Judge Dredd (the 1995 version with Sylvester Stallone), news is broadcast on a fixed TV screen by a CNN-style commentator. Information delivered to the population via the internet and directly to personal digital devices was also not foreseen.
The original Star Trek TV series from the 1960s did better, foreseeing handheld communicators and Siri-like talking computers. Some inventors even said they were inspired by these sci-fi props to come up with the real thing.
