Silent Emptiness

What would it take to make a good (or even great) Blade Runner sequel? The original became a cult hit mainly because (a) it had an interesting, well textured setting (b) it projected a very clear style or mood that fit well with (c) an interesting moral question about what makes one "human" that is ultimately left up to the viewer, (d) while including enough action directly related to the question to keep it interesting on first viewing. I think a good sequel would need to (a) replicate and build on the setting (b) choose a DIFFERENT question, or perhaps deeper examination of the original moral question to examine; and (c) fit the style/mood to that examination - and of course (d) driving it all with some cool action scenes. Forget the off-world colonies - it's far more interesting to look at how alien Earth would have become, to our eyes. The original looked at an organic mix of decaying remnants of today's cities threaded and overshadowed by ultra-tech future stuff,...

Speech recognition listens to everything being said near you. You have some means to easily display the transcript and highlight anything. Speech recognition wouldn't even have to get better - Google could search phonetically. So if someone makes reference to something you don't understand, just zip back to it, select it, and google it. Or ask a question out loud - then select and google. Or pre-select, state your question, and release the selection - no need to go back and visually select. If you see something in a different language, simply say the language you think it is, and try to pronouce it. "French quincaillerie". Select and google. Etc.

Teachable moment - that short window of time in which someone wonders about something and, if presented with the answer, will readily and painlessly absorb it and retain it. Teachable Moments(tm): Software, physical or virtual device, mounted in, as part of, or associated with something one has with one pretty much all the time. I.e., most likely one's cellphone. Google was a first approximation - good for finding answers about anything, but not as easily or specifically as needed. TM needs next level - take in a full context of what the person is doing, where they are, what they've been asking previously, apply some AI, parse a natural language, spoken or tersely typed question, verify that you have the right question, correct that if necessary (but minimize that), then provide the specific answer AND volunteer a little more context AND provide links to related context - hopefully the answer should always be "almost satisfying" - in the sense that it provides t...