How Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ Saw Into the Future

50 years later we're living what it predicted in technology, and that wasn't by chance.  Great article.

How Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ Saw Into the Future

In the film’s final cut, the Newspads were only used by the astronauts to watch a TV program ostensibly from the BBC and were thus largely indistinguishable from the various other displays embedded in the sets. But the production had received permission from the New York Times to use its logo, and Kubrick’s designers had mocked up a digital front page for the Newspads, complete with multiple story choices to be accessed by touch-screen command. If the page had been used, the movie would almost certainly now be seen as having predicted the internet.

More than four decades later, however, the predictive futurism of “2001” was decisively ratified when Apple released its first iPad in 2010. Samsung issued a similar device a year later, and Apple immediately sued for patent infringement. That August the Korean company filed a response in federal court in San Jose, Calif., asserting that Apple couldn’t possibly have invented the iPad because the device had already been envisioned in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Samsung’s unusual defense, which featured both stills and YouTube links from the film, was ultimately ruled inadmissible as evidence, but it confirmed what many fans have long appreciated: the continuing relevance and still-startling prescience of Kubrick’s masterpiece.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-kubricks-2001-a-space-odyssey-saw-into-...