I always get a bit twitchy when presented with a corporate "vision of the future" video. Unwittingly, they seem to capture the ethos and aesthetics of 1970s sci-fi movies like The Stepford Wives and and Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451, with an admixture of THX1138 and Logan's Run for good measure. Everything's clean. Everyone's happy. And yet you wouldn't want to live there.

The video that NDS showed at last week's Future World Symposium organised by the National Microelectronics Institute went one step further. It took the "we never argue" ethos of The Stepford Wives and hitched it to reality of today's X Factor. Presenting the same kind of video wall that Philips presented in its HomeLab future showhome some 15 years ago, NDS showed tomorrow's living room as some kind of media-saturated purgatory where people interacting solely through their tablet computers vote and surf their way through a diet of TV and movies.

Despite zooming in to see whether Little Ernie should go onto the next round of Pop Factor Voice or how many people around the country think Hal should open the pod bay doors (OK, I made that last bit up), the people in the room never argued about who was controlling the TV. One of them had to be wearing a digital implant or had, Elvis-like, ingested a large quantity of happy pills and burgers that rendered them immune to the video onslaught.

The medical session's video in the afternoon came from Microsoft and was much more in the Fahrenheit 451 mould. It showed two people managing their diabetes electronically, which apparently had dispatched much of the rest of the population judging by the emptiness of the hospitals. Or only people on private health plans could afford an electronic diabetes monitor. One or the other.

The saving grace of these corporate videos is that the future won't look like this. Basing a future on what people are using and watching right now is not a good start - which is where most of the corporations go wrong. The trouble starts when the companies act on these predictions and create something that's a whole lot worse.