[extropy-chat] Century City: The law show of the future

[Hal Finney]

Giu1i0 Pri5c0 wrote:
> Does anyone know how I can download the episodes?

TV episodes are often available on P2P networks like Kazaa, or via
BitTorrent.  If you do a Google search for "Century City bittorrent"
(without the quotes) you will probably find some sites where you can
get a BitTorrent download started.

David Lubkin wrote:

> My first reaction was the rant of a younger Harlan Ellison against the 
> stupidity of television. This show was not 2030. It was 2003 with a couple 
> of new capabilities. Hair, clothing, furniture, vehicles, behavior, 
> language -- it was all a mundane now.

That's true, it was not a very whiz-bang future.  There are no robots or
flying cars, and styles are much like today.  The one noticeable future
technology was the holographic display, and that's not really technically
feasible as depicted.  You can't have a gadget project an image into space
without putting some kind of reflecting matter there to project onto.

But after all, it's not easy to extrapolate 25 years forward.  I don't
think that even among our small group we would find any consensus about
the world of 2030.  And for styles, the problem is that just as 25 year
old styles look corny to us, any realistic 25-year-forward styles would
probably look bizarre and/or stupid, and distract from the story.

The place the future technologies do show up is in the legal cases.
One of the other problems I had with the show was that it seemed that
the lawyers were too ignorant about the technologies of their own world.
They reacted with shock to the suggestion of creating an anencephalic
clone, and were amazed that the young-looking rock stars were actually 70.
Presumably these developments would be of great interest and be widely
known.

On the other hand it is often the case that technological controversies
do enter the public arena by the vehicle of legal cases.  A technology
may be running along without attracting much attention, until something
goes wrong and it gets into the courts, and then the whole thing blows
up, and society suddenly has to decide how to grapple with this new issue.
I think that's the idea of this show, that the courts are where many
of these questions are being dealt with for the first time.

Hal