Last year, I started writing stories about the uncanny melding of science fiction, real-world technology, and games in mainstream entertainment such as HBO’s Westworld. The sci-fi in games and other entertainment used to be really out there, divorced from real-life technology and the near future.
But then came lightning fast advances in artificial intelligence for voice services and self-driving cars, and that blurred the line between sci-fi and Silicon Valley. Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japan’s SoftBank conglomerate, bought ARM for $32 billion. Why? He wanted to build the Singularity, or the day when A.I. becomes smarter than the collective intelligence of humans. When I heard Son say that he was preparing to invest for the Singularity, I was astounded by his ambition.
Image Credit: Dean Takahashi
But he’s not alone. This movement prompted Eliot Peper, an author that I’ll talk more about below, to ask the question, “Are we living in science fiction?” And it moved Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Nvidia, to say, “I don’t really have to watch science fiction because I’m in science fiction today.” Novels such as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash inspired Silicon Valley’s virtual worlds, like Second Life. Blade Runner, The Matrix, Inception, Black Mirror, Ex Machina, The Terminator, and HBO’s new remake of Westworld have also inspired new visions for technology companies and new plots for video game stories. Sci-fi and video games are a mirror for our own times.
This is a longhand way of saying that changes are coming really fast, and real life is surpassing what was once science fiction, and that the feedback cycle for inspiration and creativity in games, sci-fi, and tech is accelerating. That’s why I chose this as the theme for GamesBeat Summit, our conference coming on May 1-2 in Berkeley. I’m going to try to explain why I truly believe that you have to be there. I feel that I was in a good spot to see the connections, as I have covered games for 20 years and written about technology for more than 25 years.
Months ago, this idea of cross fertilization between different creative industries was just a vision. But I’m happy to say we’re living up to that vision with our event. Tim Sweeney, who recently waxed poetically about how building the Metaverse from Snow Crash is now possible, will lead off our event.
One of our key speakers is John Underkoffler, CEO of Oblong Industries. Back in 2002, Underkoffler was the science adviser for the landmark sci-fi film Minority Report. In 2006, Underkoffler started Oblong Industries to take the ideas from Minority Report and build the next generation of computing interfaces. In 2012, the company began selling commercial versions of that interface, the Mezzanine platform for immersive visual collaboration.
He’s going to give a talk at GamesBeat Summit about how games are the vanguard of the user interface, the value of working at visual scale, and…