ADVANCED WARFARE: Exoskeletons and drones are used for warfare in the upcoming Call of Duty, but that isn't their only real-world application. Image source: ActivisionWe may not have our flying cars, but in a lot of ways the future is with us.
Powered exoskeletons are allowing paraplegics to walk and giving fully able people many times normal human strength.
Robotic drones, some completely automated, are flying through our skies and exploring underground and in the ocean.
Some researchers are even working on forms of invisibility – some like the "Predator's" adaptive camouflage, and others that literally bend light around an object.
These things are with us now, but some people are employed to predict what will come next.
Australian business futurist Morris Miselowski is one of those people, making a living analysing social and technological trends to prepare his clients for the next decade and beyond.
Right now, however, Miselowski's job is to talk about a video game.
The latest edition in the record-breaking Call of Duty series, subtitled Advanced Warfare, is due in a few months, and Miselowski has been contracted to discuss the real-world technology on display in this near-future techno-thriller.
"I try to understand tomorrow's landscape," he says. "My role is to imagine what might be, and with CoD all of the imagining has been done. All of the technologies we talk about are there in a virtual sense; even though we can't physically do these things yet, we can virtually have a go at them, talk about what they might be, and how we might use them.
"When I was a child my imagination was fired by science fiction, watching Star Trek and that kind of thing. Today's kids are fired up by gaming, a sort of first-hand experience.
"I had to sit looking at my television screen and not really doing it, but these kids are doing it.
"What I find interesting is not so much in the mechanical process of the gun firing, but the thought process of how do I use it, in what environment will it be useful, how will people engage with it? They're really getting that first-hand experience."
On the topic of whether some technologies should not be developed, Miselowski falls back on the ethics of application, rather than the technology itself.
"I follow a great philosopher by the name of Maxwell Smart,"he says. "And he said that things can be used for niceness or evilness. That's really what this comes down to with technology, and it always has.
"My great desire is to see what kind of thinking this generation will get out of playing this game, and what the conversation will be in five or 10 years as they play with it and see the possibilities out there."
"It doesn't matter what the technology is, it's always benign. Technology is a box; you can turn it off, never pick it up, never use it. It's only in the hands of people that you can decide to do good or bad with it.
"Take fire for example. We can use it for wonderful things like keeping us warm and cooking and all kinds of things, but in the hands of a small minority it can be used for something ... not as wonderful.
"We're always going to have that, but that's never a good enough reason, to me, to say we shouldn't have a technology. What we should have is people who respect it more, and know how to use it better or more wisely."
Miselowski believes more advanced military technology will lead to smaller deployments, smarter applications of hardware and ultimately less death.
"I think battle and warfare is a precision conversation now," he says. "It's not about numbers so much any more.
"Only a few years ago you might have had to send thousands of people into a battle, but now you can send just a few, and you can have many of them remote and away from the fight using things like drones, which we see in the game. You can go in and do surveillance, do reconnaissance, do the firing if that's required. That's saving human lives."
Miselowski is also excited by the possibilities of video games, in particular online multiplayer games.
"Multiplayer gaming is not just one person thinking in isolation but a collective digital tribe moving and thinking together," he says.
"My great desire is to see what kind of thinking this generation will get out of playing this game, and what the conversation will be in five or 10 years as they play with it and see the possibilities out there."
He also hopes that, as with many other technologies originally developed for warfare, great benefits will come from these apparently destructive future technologies.
"They're used for warfare in the game, but they're used for so many things. They're being used for healthcare in Japan, allowing staff to pick up patients and move them around.
"There's a lot of prototyping being done to use those technologies for physically disabled people – quadriplegics, paraplegics."
Miselowski hopes the experience of playing with these technologies in a virtual arena will spark gamers' imaginations, leading them to consider more peaceful applications.
"When you have the reality of these inventions you begin to find other purposes for them. The people playing this game see it for what it is, but I think they also see it for what it could be."
Gamers can try out this virtual technology for themselves when Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare launches in November on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows PC.
This article was featured on Stuff NZ and was written by James "DexX" Dominguez.
DexX is on Twitter: @jamesjdominguez