The movie and TV tech we actually want to use

One way to think about the tech industry is just as a series of people trying to build stuff they saw in movies. Ready Player One helped kick of a flood of interest in the metaverse, despite the movie’s deeply dsytopian undertones. If you’ve talked to anyone working in AI, they’ve surely told you about the assistant in Her, despite that movie’s dystopian undertones. From the gesture interface in Minority Report to the hand-phone from Total Recall to just about everything from Back to the Future and Star Trek, you really can’t underestimate how important and inspirational these movies and shows are to the tech imagination.

On this episode of The Vergecast, a bunch of us try to figure out which tech we actually want to use. David is joined by The Verge’s Allison Johnson, Jennifer Pattison-Tuohy, Mia Sato, and Victoria Song — aka the hosts of Hot Girl Vergecast Summer, coming to a feed near you for the next couple of months — to draft their way through the movie, show, and game tech they’d want to make real.

There are only a few rules in the draft. Rule No. 1: You can’t draft concepts, like “time travel” or “cloning.” You have to draft actual products. Rule No. 2: Whatever you draft, you’re making suddenly available to lots of people. It’s not that everyone will have it, but lots of people will — think of it as roughly Mac Pro-level popular. Rule No. 3: Products have to be tech and science, not magic. No wands allowed. And, maybe most important, Rule No. 4: no making the world a better place.

With those rules in place, our hosts spent the next hour or so picking five items apiece, from any show or movie we wanted. Some of the picks you’ll expect, and some we’d bet had never crossed your mind. And some big-name tech went undrafted! Here are the results of the draft, so don’t read on until you’ve listened to the show:

Jen’s picks:

Vee’s picks:

Mia’s picks:

Allison’s picks:

David’s picks:

Now here’s where you come in. We need to know who won the draft! And there’s one simple question you need to help us answer: whose five picks do you most want to make real? That’s who really won the draft. You can vote in the poll, tell us in the comments, call the Hotline, send us an email, whatever you like. And tell us what we missed, too! What would be in your draft picks that we missed entirely? We know there’s a lot we didn’t get to… and we’ll have to do this again soon.