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More rubbish talk by Mr. 'Inevitability', aka Kurzweil!

The man's no futurist – he's a dreamer. Real futurists don't 'predict' things and actively pushes the ignorant wannabes to make *his* own dreams come true.

Worse still, the faux “futurist” blasts well-known fictitious works for not including his biased vision of the future “in the works”! Fortunately James Cameron doesn't have a Kurzweil leash around his neck.

Frankly, Kurzweil (and nonreligious modernCult devotees) have no right telling other fiction writers what to write about. Period.

Being an avid consumer of most things sf, I'd say that by far the greatest problem for me are the fictions that extrapolate on tech but NOT on social or cultural issues. It seems, for example, that gender issues, sexuality, normality issues etc. are throwbacks to the 1950's in much sf. This is too bad - for me, the interesting changes are not technological but social and cultural (or rather, the interesting things are the ways in which tech intersects with the social!). Banks' Culture novels are good for this, as well as much of Dick's stuff. Vinge is not too bad either, Butler & LeGuin of course,...

I agree with the general argument Ray made but I think there are several factors that Cameron was probably considering that he has not.

Not everyone uses the latest stuff all the time. If I was building a mining colony that could only be resupplied every nine years or so i wouldn't install the latest technology. I would take the most robust easy to maintain gear I could lay my hands on. In fact i would probably prefer tech i could concievably make my own spare parts for and ammunition that could be reloaded from local resources. I think the big clunky exoskeletons fit that bill as do the bullet spitting machine guns, the big hologram projectors etc. etc.
Also, remember the base in Pandora wasn't a military base, it was a civilian mining colony threatened by (what they thought) were dumb primatives. If James Cameron reasoned that they would be unlikely to get government permission to use the latest nanite super weapons or "the company" thought such things were too expensive, I would agree with him.

As for the munitions: The best way to deliver a lot of energy, reliably, cheaply over a distance is still the humble lead slug. Lasers have been found to be useless at knocking out tanks for example.

First, let me say this: I hated Avatar. I hated the story, I hated the ... well, I hated just about everything about it - but - I thought that it was a watershed moment - the movie, not the story - a moment that we will look at and judge films by, looking at them in terms of 'before Avatar' and 'after Avatar'. Things will never be the same in the movies. The stories, however, had better improve.

There is a natural tendency in our society to equate success with money, to judge the quality of something with how much money it 'makes' or 'generates'. Unfortunately, as we have seen through the movie Avatar, neither of these metrics are valid when it comes to assessing the quality or intrinsic value of anything within the realm of the entertainment industry. As Kurzweil points out, Avatar falls short on delivering any sort of vision of advanced future technologies, though I would submit that there was - perhaps - one or two interesting aviation developments, particularly in so far as the 'huey-like' attack helicopter (that wasn't) - but I digress, I come not to praise Avatar ... regardless of how interesting one or two flying machines may have looked the story fell miserably short of delivering anything beyond (yet another) view of the 'Ugly American' syndrome, featuring the ills of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism at its worst. The technological aspect of the movie, quite frankly, does not even pass that which was introduced in the movie 'Minority Report'. Let's face it, when you have the cops on your doorstep taking you down for the crime that you haven't yet committed ... that's a technological advance (and the marbles were totally cool).

Ultimately, the only thing that Avatar has left me with is the nagging thought of 'oh, this movie would look really different if they used Cameran's Avatar technology' - and that will be its ultimate contribution. Imagine Jurassic Park - a ground breaking movie in its own right - but - imagine it with Cameran's technology ... yeah ... I thought so. Sorry Steven; they just don't look ... well, they don't look as real anymore. Blame James.

There are a ton of great hard SF books out there today that could easily be transcribed into movie format. For example: I'd love to see a movie adaptation of Rainbow's End by Vinge but, as we all know, the book is always better than the movie. I think I'd rather let writers take on the task of hard SF and not let Hollywood mess it up. The closest they've come so far is Johnny Mnemonic. A great Gibson short story, arguably a terrible movie. (still doesn't stop me from wearing out the disc, though) I suppose we'll just have to wait and see what they can come up with. All I know is that if Avatar is the best they can do, I'm sorely disappointed. (Disclaimer: It was a very beautiful looking movie)

I'm with Kurzweil on this one

The beauty of science fiction is that you are free to manipulate what you want about the future in order to tell your story. Everything else is just aesthetics. For example, the movie Blade Runner takes place in I think 2016, yet exists in a world without computers. Yet is still… a good movie? WHAT? The mechanism of it taking place in the future provided Blade Runner to explore the idea of the definition of a human through the genetic-machine called a replicant. Besides that, the movie took place in a rainy city on ground floor.

Point being. I agree with the closing statement of this article that says not all sci fi needs to be hard sci fi (meaning accurate from a futurist's perspective, i presume), including Avatar.

When telling a story, you don't want to overload the viewer with too many ideas (we use virtual reality in the future, what's a computer?) because that tends to take away from the story. Instead, if one uses futuristic portrayals of things we use today...

well, there ya go.