Ergo Proxy

After the atmosphere explodes, the remaining members of mankind are forced to live in isolated domed cities scattered across an arid and inhospitable landscape. In a hasty attempt to preserve humanity, a secret human regeneration project is started. The story takes place in one of the domed cities where humans coexist with androids known as AutoReivs. But the AutoReivs get infected with a virus that causes them to become self-aware, and they start murdering people.

All the while, the government is conducting secret experiments on a mysterious human life form called a “Proxy” which is believed to hold the key to the survival of mankind. The humans in the city are grown in artificial wombs and are only grown to fulfill a particular purpose, ensuring that everyone has a place in society.

The future in Ergo Proxy does not seem like the kind of future I’d want to live in. Sure, it’s cool to coexist with androids, but not when they’re wanting to kill you. Plus you’ve got these weird Proxy things running around (terrifying) and you can’t travel with any sort of ease as the planet is pretty much screwed over. This future is really interesting to read about and watch, but I would definitely not want to live in it.

Chobits

In the world of Chobits, personal computers are now personal companions, looking and acting like most anyone else. The main character can’t afford his own Persocom, but he finds an abandoned one (named Chi since that’s all she can say in the beginning) which he later discovers might be a “Chobit”, an advanced type of Persocom rumored to have independent thought.

The story explores Chi’s origins and human/Persocom relations. Chi starts to develop feelings for her owner, and her owner struggles with his feelings for her all while teaching her how to speak and act like a normal human/Persocom.

The future imagined in Chobits sounds like a fairly safe, decently realistic near future. Like Kirobo, the robots in Chobits are designed to help humans and be personal companions. That’s great. None of them are killing people, and nothing bad is happening. It does seem a bit unnatural for humans and androids to develop feelings for one another, but perhaps this will become a normal thing one day in the future.

Psycho-Pass

In the not so distant future of Psycho Pass, we see a world without stress. But without stress comes a surprising amount of stress about not being stressed out. Maybe it’s due to the devices which can instantly measure a person’s mental state, personality, and the probability that they’ll commit a crime? If your Psycho-Pass (ha! That’s where the name comes from) Crime Coefficient Index is deemed too high by the Sibyl System (a “computer” system that makes decisions on these things), someone will come and get you for some much needed psycho-therapy (or much needed psycho-death, depending on how high your Index is).

This is all well and good, but some people in this society are secretly  not fans of the Sibyl System. They’re told what they should do for work, they aren’t allowed to do anything that’s stressful, and nobody has any ambition since the Sibyl system decides where you should work and what you should do. Since it wasn’t too long since the Sibyl System was put in place, there are those who remember nostalgic / stressful things like older literature, theater, and philosophy.

In this series there’s a group of people who figure out how to get around the Sibyl System, and that causes all kinds of chaos, because the Dominators (weapons that can only shoot people with a high Crime Coefficient Index) used by the police are unable to do anything. During this period the anime has you question whether it’s good for society to live without stress or not. I’ll let you watch the anime so you can decide for yourself. I wouldn’t want to give too much away.

This series reminds me a little bit of Minority Report, though a somewhat more realistic version of it. Instead of predicting  crimes, they’re just removing the “bad” elements of society while reducing stress to zero. Crime is at an all time low, but you really have to wonder if that’s actually a good thing or not. I could see a time in our future when scientists are finally able to get an idea of what a “healthy” brain looks like. Then, everyone who doesn’t fit within that “healthy” brain range will… well… hopefully not anything too bad.

Cowboy Bebop

Cowboy Bebop is set in the year 2071 and the entire solar system has been made accessible through hyperspace gates. In 2022, the explosion of an experimental hyperspace gateway messes up the moon pretty bad, resulting in a debris ring and meteor bombardments that end up killing a lot of Earthlings. Many survivors abandon Earth to colonize the inner planets, the asteroid belt, and the moons of Jupiter.

Mars has become the new central hub of human civilization, and interplanetary crime syndicates have their claws in the government and the Inter-Solar System Police (ISSP), limiting their effectiveness. To combat this, a bounty system similar to that in the Old West is established. These bounty hunters deal with fugitives, terrorists, and other criminals. They are often known as “cowboys”, hence the name of the show.

The future imagined in Cowboy Bebop is really cool. I think space westerns such as Firefly are great, and Cowboy Bebop is no exception. Exploring the frontiers of space and bounty hunting sounds pretty appealing. In reality I might not be so keen on experiencing all this danger and excitement firsthand, but it sure is a joy to watch.

Sword Art Online

Sword Art Online takes place in the near future and focuses on virtual reality MMOs. In the year 2022, Sword Art Online is released. With a virtual reality helmet known as Nerve Gear, players can experience and control their game characters with their minds.

Nerve Gear is hooked up to the user in such a way so that everything experienced in the game feels like it is actually happening. The first half of the series focuses on a group that is trapped inside Sword Art Online and if they die in the game, they die in real life too.

This future sounds amazing. I love a good MMO, and a VR MMO sounds like something I would enjoy immensely. We’re already headed in this direction with the Oculus Rift (can’t wait to get one of these once good games start being developed for it), and this seems like something that could happen in the not too distant future. As long as I don’t get trapped in a game (scary!) this future sounds absolutely fantastic.

Robotics;Notes

The year is 2019 and the location is Tanegashima, an island in Southern Japan. Like many Japanese futures (heck, even presents!) robots are involved. In this series, a group of high schoolers in the robotics club at Central Tanegashima High School decide to see if they can put together and build a giant robot. Small robots are pretty easy to do in 2019, but big ones? That’s still a large challenge, especially for a group of kids.

As the series progresses, you get to see what it takes to build a giant robot in the year 2019. You also get to see some battling miniature robots… kind of a futuristic Battlebots. If stuff like this exists in the future you can bet I’ll be watching it on my Occulus Rift. On top of the big and small robots is also a conspiracy that I won’t get into. You should watch the series if you want to know more about that.

All in all, the life of someone in 2019 as portrayed by this anime seems somewhat realistic to me. Building giant robots isn’t particularly easy, but it’s getting there (you know it will someday if Japan has any say in the issue). There’s a lot more augmented reality going on, and high schoolers still play fighting games on their handhelds. I liked this series because it had a somewhat believable (but not always) view of the future… a future with giant robots appearing sometime in my lifetime. I can dream, anyways.

Neon Genesis Evangelion

In 2000 a global cataclysm destroys most of Antarctica and leads to the deaths of half of all humanity. Thought by the public to have been a meteor impact, the event causes tsunamis, global climate changes, geopolitical unrest, general economic distress, and nuclear war.

Over the next ten years, the organizations known as GEHIRN, SEELE, and NERV achieve a number of impressive scientific achievements, including the creation of giant humanoids known as Evangelions in preparation for the arrival of alien beings known as Angels (which turn out to be responsible for the 2000 incident).

This future sounds terrifying. For the most part, it’s pretty normal (once things settle down post Impact), unless you are one of the characters actually on the show, then your life is pretty messed up. For most of the population, life is relatively unchanged until an Angel shows up, then everything goes to hell.

Living in constant fear of that, plus the huge Evas running around and the collateral damage from them sounds dreadful. Even being one of the kid pilots sounds terrible given the psychological damage they all experience. Don’t get me wrong though – this show is fantastic and I love it to death. I just wouldn’t want to live in it.

Paprika

In the near future, a revolutionary new psychotherapy treatment called dream therapy has been invented. This is made possible thanks to a device called the “DC Mini”. The DC Mini allows the user to view other people’s dreams. The head of the team working on this treatment begins using the machine illegally to help psychiatric patients outside the research facility, using her alter-ego known as Paprika.

The world in Paprika is pretty similar to that imagined in the movie Inception. You’ve got people diving into other people’s dreams, influencing and messing with them. The device can be used for fun, but it can also be used for therapy. Once it gets into the wrong hands – then you’ve got trouble. And that’s what happens in this anime.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this technology. I mean, it would be awesome to have my dreams recorded so I could watch them later and really remember what happened, and I’m sure this information could be used to help people struggling with nightmares or people with deep seeded psychological issues.

On the other hand, it sounds terrifying for someone to be able to invade my dreams without my consent or be somehow manipulated by this process. Also, my dreams are my dreams and I wouldn’t want anyone I didn’t trust just eavesdropping on them either.

Steins;Gate

This series doesn’t actually take place in the future at all! In fact, it’s set in the past: Summer, 2010. So how did this series make the “future” list? Time travel. In the series, Rintarou Okabe, “the mad scientist,” discovers that the microwave they’ve been working on is actually a time machine with the ability to send text messages to the past.

A group called SERN (yeah, suspiciously similar to CERN) has been researching time travel as well. In fact, they have tried to send people back in time from the future already, though this has resulted in a lot of blobby, disfigured, and very dead time-traveler messes. More on SERN in a minute. Later, Kurisu (another member of this very casual mad scientist group) figures out how to change their time machine to send someone’s memories back in time, which would allow someone to time travel without dying. Smart girl!

But wait, this post is about the future! Throughout the series, we get glimpses and hints of the future from people in the future who either come to visit or send messages back in time. The actions that Okabe and friends take have a great affect on what happens in the future. If xyz dies, the world will be ruled by SERN due to their time travel abilities. If zyx dies, then World War III will start because someone will have stolen the information needed to build a time machine (and then have sold it to the Russians). Every little action, even ones that seemed inconsequential in the beginning of the series had bigger and bigger future results, especially as Okabe kept traveling back, changing things a little at a time.

While the future in this series is very important, they don’t show much of it. It’s just hints, for the most part. Still, I thought they did a really good job with time travel. It didn’t feel too ridiculous, and I found myself thinking how little actions could affect the future in a big way. A butterfly effect, essentially. The lesson here: if you have a time machine, please don’t mess up the future and keep hopping around until you fix it, okay? Also make sure you can send text messages through time. It’s very helpful if your future self can let you know when you screwed up. Let’s hope future cell carriers don’t charge too much for inter-time texts.

Ghost in the Shell

In the year 2029, the world has become interconnected via a vast electronic network. It’s the internet on steroids. That same network also becomes a battlefield for Tokyo’s Section Nine security force, which has been charged with apprehending a dangerous hacker known only as the Puppet Master.

Computer technology has advanced to the point that many members of the public possess “cyberbrains”. This technology allows them to connect their biological brain with various networks. The level of cyberization ranges from simple interfaces to almost complete replacement of the brain with cybernetic parts, such as in cases of severe trauma.

This can also be combined with various levels of prostheses, with a fully prosthetic body allowing a person to become a cyborg. On the downside, this opens up the brain to attacks from hackers. These hackers can then affect the actions of the person which is really, really scary.

This is another future that sounds like it has the potential to be very cool, other than the fact I would be afraid of getting my brain hacked. Today, it’s not very common to get your computer hacked, but even if that does happen, you just reinstall everything or get a new computer or whatever.

But in this case, it would be your brain getting hacked and that can do a lot more damage to you and your life than getting your computer hacked. You can’t exactly reinstall your brain or get a new one, and who knows how much damage a hacker could do controlling you before you could fix the problem? I dunno, this future, if done right, could be cool – but the potential risks to your brain would make me a bit uneasy I think.

Which Future Do You Choose?

So anime has predicted our futures. Some are more realistic than others, but it’s hard to say that none of them are totally impossible. Personally, a VR MMO world sounds pretty fun to me (Blizzard, get working on that, would you?), though the ability to travel through time seems to have its benefits (and pitfalls)… how about you, though? Which one of these (or combination) would you choose for your own life? Let me know in the comments below.

Bonus: Koichi actually wrote about 3 out of the 10 animes above. Can you guess which ones?

Header Image by vagoverto

Kirobo

Derived from the Japanese words for “hope” and “robot”, Kirobo was launched into space by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) along with literally tons of other supplies and machinery just last week. Kirobo was designed as a companion for International Space Station astronaut Koichi Wakata. Kirobo will also help in relaying information from Koichi to another robot on Earth.

The biggest challenge in making this robot was designing it so it could function in zero gravity. The robot talks, and can also recognize different faces and voices. It’s part of a program that aims to provide companionship for the elderly and/or lonely. For anyone who’s seen Robot & Frank (video clip further below), this is a pretty cool step in the direction of a future rife with sci-fi excitement.

Kirobo should spend about 18 months on the space station under the care of Koichi. I’m sure the other astronauts will get to play with him too, depending on how selfish Koichi is feeling. Too bad for them Kirobo only speaks Japanese.

The robot is a product of a collaboration between Dentsu, The University of Tokyo, Robo Garage, and Toyota. The overall goal of their Kibo Robot Project is to “help solve the problems brought about by a society that has become more individualized and less communicative. Nowadays, more and more people are living alone.” They hope a conversational robot such as Kirobo would help these people feel less lonely.

Japan, Robots, and the Future

Kirobo is the first of many robots that could improve the health and wellbeing of many people just by being there to talk and interact with. When humans are isolated, psychological and cognitive damage can occur.

Writing in Psychology Today, Hara Estroff Marano noted that “unmet social needs take a serious toll on health, eroding our arteries, creating high blood pressure, and even undermining learning and memory.” This is especially important for those living in Japan, because, as we all know, Japanese people live forever.

Being in space can get pretty lonely at times, and this is where Kirobo comes in. At least the people on the space station have their crew, but not all of them speak the same language as it is an international space station. Plus, this is just kind of a test to see how a robot like Kirobo would function if somewhere down the road we start sending lone astronauts on trips to the Moon, Mars, or beyond. Those people would get pretty lonely, and having a little buddy like Kirobo around would make things a little bit more bearable. Anyone seen the movie Moon?

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Also, the technology developed and refined here might one day improve your car (if it’s a Toyota, that is). Toyota is responsible for the voice recognition tech in Kirobo, so what they learn from this experiment will be applied in future car models with voice activated controls.

Kirobo arrives at the station this month, but won’t actually get set up and start speaking until later in the month or early September. Apparently Koichi isn’t even getting to the space station until November, but he’s going to be the first Japanese Commander of the International Space Station, so that’s pretty cool.

Koichi will start getting into serious tests and experiments with Kirobo come December. Why they sent Kirobo separate from Koichi and spread so far apart, I’m not quite sure.

How Did We Get Here? Where Will We Go?

If you’ve been keeping up with Japanese tech and/or Tofugu, you’ll know that Japan has been at the forefront of humanoid robot technology. Everything from sex dolls to retail store models has already been done (all of which secretly want to kill you). Kirobo is one of many steps towards getting robot companions to those that need them.

I think this is one of the coolest, but also scariest, directions robot tech can head in. How many movies and TV shows have we seen where robot companions go berserk, become self-aware, or cause some sort of harm to their fleshy overlords? I mean, we joked about it before when we were talking about Vocaloids, but actual physical robots like Kirobo pose a much larger potential threat.

Even more than the robots acting on their own, what about hackers and viruses for something to worry about? What if someone found a way to hack into your robot companion and used an Xbox controller to make the robot flush your cat down the toilet and rack up tons of expenses on pay-per-view? The horror! But no, seriously, how terrible would it be to get strangled in your sleep by your robot “friend”? That would be just dreadful.

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On the other hand, how awesome would it be to have a fully capable companion robot? It would be super awesome. Think of how much more productive (or lazy) you could be. The robot could cook and clean for you, freeing up lots of time for you to do whatever.

And while these kinds of robots could help extreme introverts and the elderly, people who don’t get enough social interaction for whatever reason – these robots might also encourage some to not seek social interaction from real people. Why go out into the real work when you have a customizable robot that can do and be whatever you want it to? These are all things to consider as we head down this road.

Let’s Take a Few Steps Back

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But anyway, let’s get back to Kirobo and space. I think it’s a pretty cool idea. Right now it might seem like kind of like a novelty, and not really all that serious. But everything has to start somewhere, and Kirobo is already getting plenty of publicity since the space station he is going to is an international one, and lots of people care about space and stuff.

Will Kirobo be the catalyst that sparks the world into developing more robot companions like him? Perhaps. Will it happen anytime soon? Hopefully.

So tell me, would you want a companion robot like Kirobo or any other sort of robot like you’ve seen in fiction? Why or why wouldn’t you want one? Share your thoughts about the future and let us know in the comments!

Sites Referenced:
Forbes