The Making of Stanley Kubrick's 200: A Space Odyssey: How the 1968 film accurately prophesized future technology. (Slate)

From a review of The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s '2001: A Space Odyssey' (original edition US $1,000; new edition $69.99; Amazon Prime preorder $46.93); see the Wired version of the article for a photo gallery

"This forced Kubrick’s team to do deep, meticulous research, which Bizony says helps explain why much of the set design accurately forecasted how we live with technology today. “The executive briefcase with its phone handset and dial? Look closely, and all the elements of the laptop or smartphone are there, half a century ahead of time,” Bizony tells Wired. You could also, for example, see HAL 9000 as a proto-Siri.

The book is packed with other details about the making of the film (for example, Clarke wrote the most of the screenplay at the Chelsea Hotel, in the company of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg), but is most elucidating in its attention to the technical and design details that made the film such an enduring paragon almost 50 years after its release."

The Making of Stanley Kubrick's 200: A Space Odyssey: How the 1968 film accurately prophesized future technology.