Tom Cruise is a man who knows a thing or two about ridiculous notions from science fiction influencing real life organisations.
We are of course talking about Minority Report, the 2002 science fiction movie which introduced the idea of gesture-based computing to the mainstream.'
On a press trip for his new post alien apocalypse movie 'Oblivion', he said that the influence of the earlier film's ideas ran deep. In fact - he claimed - it basically made the iPad possible. He said:
"It was interesting with Minority Report because we came up with that 'scrubbing' the image [gesture], and that's how Apple did the iPad. That's how that came up, which is very cool," he said.
Hmm, we're not quite sure Steve Jobs was that easily influenced - though to Cruise's credit he was talking in generalities, not taking specific credit.
And we can't hold the assertion against him - he also called for the invention of bubble ships, which are used in the new film and which are awesome obviously.
"Science fiction writing has always inspired future things," he said. "I would like it if they could build a bubble ship like that so that we could all fly around in that bubble ship, that would be very cool."