WANT a glimpse of the future? Just look to the movies.
No, really, it's more than a cliche. Whether it's brilliant imagination or some very talented writing, Hollywood seems to have come up with an accurate picture of what the future could hold, when it comes to technology. Some of it is frighteningly spot on.
Just take the technological breakthroughs coming up in the realms of defence and transport, for example.
A lot of the stuff you see in science-fiction and futuristic action movies may have come across as wildly imaginative 10 or 20 years ago, but today, it's exactly what boffins are working on, for real.
Autonomous robots that detect intruders and shoot on sight? Sounds like Terminator 1.0.
Non-lethal lasers that can hit people without killing them? Star Trek's been there, done that. ("Set phasers to stun.")
Personalised urban vehicles that take you door-to-door yet belong to a public-transport network? That's what Tom Cruise tried to escape in, in Minority Report. (He was unfortunately recognised by eye biometric recognition systems - being used today too.)
Cars that run on biomass? Go Back To The Future.
In case you think these examples are made-up, they're not. Samsung's built the robot, US is trying out the laser, the PRT (Personalised Rapid Transit) is being built for trials at Heathrow Airport, and Toyota has a car that runs on algae. Yes, algae.
Movie buffs could spend days just tracking what technology the big screen has envisioned, that has become a reality today.
What's sometimes disappointing is not that Hollywood has to lead the way, but how slow reality has been to catch up with it.
Movies that have dared to attach specific timeframes to their storyline have often found that the years have come and gone, and still no transporter, no sentient robots, and no floating skateboards.
We're nowhere near the techie world envisioned in 2001: Space Odyssey and 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Sure, today's computers are powerful, but can they sing like HAL?
In fact, a lot of technological developments have failed to meet the optimistic predictions confidently delivered by futurists 10 years ago.
Some had expected sales of electric cars to take up a significant portion of the auto market by 2010, but Singaporean roads aren't exactly filled with them. Road cleaning machines don't count.
And the problems have been, well, mundane, given what we've achieved in other fields like computing. "The battery doesn't last long enough." "The car's too heavy to fly."
Truth's not stranger than fiction, it seems, it's slower. And it doesn't beam me up.
Read the Saturday Special Report here