Kevin Ho, president of Huawei’s handset product line, told the CES Asia conference in Shanghai on Wednesday the company used science fiction movies like "The Matrix" to envision future trends and new business ideas.

Ho said:
“Hunger, poverty, disease or even death may not be a problem by 2035, or 25 years from now. In the future you may be able to purchase computing capacity to serve as a surrogate, to pass the baton from the physical world to the digital world.”

 

Huawei thinks there will be a world where children could use apps like WeChat to interact with dead grandparents, thanks to the ability to download human consciousness into computers. This could be a money spinner for Huawei which sees a need for huge amounts of data storage to house the consciousness of the dead for the young necromancers to use.

Ho also referred to a scene in "The Matrix" where a character downloads the ability to fly a helicopter.

“That kind of data download volume exceeds current levels,” he said. “In the future storage will need to exceed 15,000 Zettabytes so this is a huge increase.”

Huawei is clearly making business preparations based on the intangible possibilities facing the species. Ho said science fiction films help his teams create new product lines.

“A lot of science fiction has prompted me to have this type of thinking – in science fiction we’ve seen some terrible worlds where technology destroys human society.”

Ho described a film in which Mr Wong, an AI persona, absorbs ideas from books then launches an attack on humanity. It shows that humanity needs better safety technology such as authentication,tech protection and remote defence.

Huawei is apparently developing all these now.