LIST OF TECHNOLOGIES IN AKIRA
Akira's bustling, grimy depiction of Neo-Tokyo is filled to the brim with different bits of technology that all underlie the corrupt foundation of the society which built it. These technologies fit into three broad categories.
CONSUMER PRODUCTS
Neo-Tokyo is heavily inspired by late 80s Japanese life, and as such features such amenities as arcade cabinets, digital jukeboxes, and prominent neon lighting throughout. This category also includes some fictional inventions which have not yet been developed, such as holographic advertisements and extravagant electric motorbikes, like the one owned by Kaneda. All of these seem like natural extensions of technologies that were around by 1988.
MILITARY
The government of Neo-Tokyo is an oppressive oligarchy, who resort to military intervention to disband protests, and eventually combat the threat posed by Tetsuo. Technologies used by the government in order to suppress dissent and combat opposition include currently available technologies such as standard firearms, police scanners, tanks, tear gas, and helicopters. The military also employs some fictional technologies, such as hoverbikes, portable laser rifles, and an orbital laser aerial strike system. Overall, the majority of technology used by military authorities seems within the realm of possibility, excluding the laser defense technologies.
BIOLOGICAL
The most expansive category of technology present in Akira is biological or psychic in nature. The only biological technology present in the film with some basis in reality is the advanced scanner used to examine Tetsuo towards the beginning of the film, which seems to be a natural extension of an MRI machine. All other technologies deal with how to inhibit, induce, detect, and control psychic abilities in humans. There are pills which allow for subjects to control the psionic abilities flowing through them, there is a surveillance system which specifically detects metahuman brain patterns, some sort of treatment which allows a normal human to develop abilities which should not develop until far later down the evolutionary timescale, and even technologies dependent on a psychic user in order to properly function, such as Tetsuo's biomechanical arm and the hoverchair used by one of the other children. Cryogenic storage is also used to safely store and limit the power of Akira's internal organs, preserving and containing them for the benefit of mankind. These technologies all assume one of the axioms of Akira's world which is not true in ours: that organisms can be granted powers that they cannot understand. The example used in the film is giving an Amoeba the ability to think and use tools: it only knows how to move and eat, and so it would use its tools to do these simple things, destroying those around it. This is what the biological technologies of Akira do to Tetsuo, and it serves as a stark warning to not create something that we cannot control.