That's a good point - in the present technology between the upper and middle classes aren't that different, but in the video it sure as hell looks that way.
Hyper-productive terminals for the creative class? What about industry? What about people working more mundane jobs instead of some future-eco-glamor-green-creative one? What will this crazy utopia-tech do for them?
I wish they spent at least a few more seconds looking at what this crazy utopia-tech does for the cab driver, or the bellhop, or the grocery store where the husband/daughter have to get their food from. Because right now it's a video of "what can future technology do for executives and her highly-paid future-eco-green-creative direct reports who work on ephemeral things that don't seem to have the slightest connection to reality".
There were so many opportunities here to explore what this tech will do to improve the lives of, well, the majority, but all of it was spent strictly on the upper-class, and that bothers me a bit. Even right now, the majority of the world doesn't work in a chic, well-appointed office. The majority doesn't fly around the world constantly...
First of all-- the technology was shown helping the bellhop in the microsoft video.
My friend works in a warehouse. It's not glamorous, and it's refrigerated, so it's maybe 40 F the whole time. A lot of the warehouse is automated, so he spends most of his time making sure that the equipment is doing what it needs to be doing. So, just one more anecdote about how technology is becoming a part of blue-collar work.
Oh, I'm well aware that technology has pervaded all walks of life - that's kind of my main beef with this video. It seems to wrap itself up entirely in this mythical environmental-engineering company, along with the very wealthy denizens of it, as if that will be the bulk, or even the theme of the world in the future... and in the end come off as rather sterile and soulless.
More interesting than whiz-bang animations of fictitious (and fantastical) office workflows IMO, would be electronic payments for the cab - imagine the woman stepping out of the taxi and seeing the cab cost, along with (something futuristic!) "submitted to expense account" or something. Or, say, traffic overlays on the windshield for the cab driver. Or for the bellhop, something more substantial than how much the guest's bags weigh (really?)
I'm having trouble distilling my thoughts on this - I guess I was expecting to see more problem-solving in a vision of the future rather than a whole lot of whiz-bang animations that look cool but are of dubious use... and solve previous few problems that are compelling.
What more substantial info does the bellhop need? One of the problems with displays of numbers like that is that they are mostly a curiosity unless something breaks, then what you need to see is whatever indicators of brokenness are relevent to identifying and fixing it. And not much is going to break there unless she arrives at a different time or is moved to another room. A future full of attention grabbing displays of data just because we can is not utopian.
Perhaps the cab cost submitted to the expense account happened behind the scenes - why would she need to be alerted about it at all? I imagine the cab was pre-paid by whichever of her staff planned the trip, or provided by the hotel. We don't know, but if this is a display of techno-efficiency around her trip, she doesn't need to know or care either.
On problem solving, it takes loading a dataset into a brain and then time thinking about it; it can't really be shown on a slick video and it doesn't need a particularly futuristic office except to the extent that we see people looking at screens of data/information. "A smaller pump would be more efficient"? As if the software which calculated that needed two people physically meeting to say so.
By necessity, a video like this can't display happenings which don't fit video as a format, and that seems to me to be a lot of everyday life experiences on the smallest scales.
Hyper-productive terminals for the creative class? What about industry? What about people working more mundane jobs instead of some future-eco-glamor-green-creative one? What will this crazy utopia-tech do for them?
I wish they spent at least a few more seconds looking at what this crazy utopia-tech does for the cab driver, or the bellhop, or the grocery store where the husband/daughter have to get their food from. Because right now it's a video of "what can future technology do for executives and her highly-paid future-eco-green-creative direct reports who work on ephemeral things that don't seem to have the slightest connection to reality".
There were so many opportunities here to explore what this tech will do to improve the lives of, well, the majority, but all of it was spent strictly on the upper-class, and that bothers me a bit. Even right now, the majority of the world doesn't work in a chic, well-appointed office. The majority doesn't fly around the world constantly...