Another favorite is E.M. Forster's prediction of video calling and more in 1909 with The Machine Stops[2]. "But it was fully fifteen seconds before the round plate that she held in her hands began to glow. A faint blue light shot across it, darkening to purple, and presently she could see the image of her son, who lived on the other side of the earth, and he could see her."
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18896513 [2] http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
I read somewhere stuff like Second Life, Google Earth etc were directly inspired by Snow Crash.
There's some other themes in Snow Crash we are just starting to see as well:
-Government difficulties with taxation of digital goods and currency
-Companies competing to attract drivers/messengers etc (basically the uber/gig ecconomy)
-For profit surveillance and commercialization of intelligence data
Cryptonomicon covers this, too. Arguably so does REAMDE.
From Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (1899):
...the cheap, and therefore indecorous, articles of daily consumption in modern industrial communities are commonly machine products; and the generic feature of the physiognomy of machine-made goods as compared with the hand-wrought article is their greater perfection in workmanship and greater accuracy in the detail execution of the design. Hence it comes about that the visible imperfections of the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both. Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up and carried forward since their time. And hence also the propaganda for a return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work and speculations of this group of men as fairly comes under the characterisation here given would have been impossible at a time when the visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper. - p162
http://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/
"R. Daneel came to his desk with a sheaf of papers. "And those are?" asked Baley. "A list of men and women who might belong to a Medievalist organization." "How many does the list include?" "Over a million," said R. Daneel. "These are just part of them." "Do you expect to check them all, Daneel?" "Obviously that would be impractical, Elijah." .... Baley said, abruptly, "How did you get your list?" "It was a machine that did it for me. Apparently, one sets it for a particular type of offense and it does the rest. I let it scan all disorderly conduct cases involving robots over the past twenty-five years. Another machine scanned all City newspapers over an equal period for the names of those involved in unfavorable statements concerning robots or men of the Outer Worlds. It is amazing what can be done in three hours. The machine even eliminated the names of non-survivors from the lists." "You are amazed? Surely you've got computers on the Outer Worlds?" "Of many sorts, certainly. Very advanced ones. Still, none are as massive and complex as the ones here. You must remember, of course, that even the largest Outer World scarcely has the population of one of your Cities and extreme complexity is not necessary."
The drug binds to individual neurons allowing an external system to manipulate the brain and e.g. overlay an OS GUI on your vision, enhance sensory input, basically make you a programmable superhuman.
The trilogy is good but mostly because it’s fun to think about this tech. If you’re at all into cyberpunk you’ll really enjoy it.
It was about successful "neuralink" implants that did the whole brain-computer interface work but one day there was a glitch/virus/broken update and anyone with the chip who got into contact with the internet would update, fry their brains and die so I remember people hiding in what I think was an underground garage.
Does anyone remember this one?
Edit: It was called H+ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZedLgAF9aEg
Therefore his predictions are not that much original research/predictions, but rather a good compilation and clever choice of ideas which had appeared earlier in various sci papers. I suspect his quite striking description of "Kindle reader" from 60s was based on some previously read paper/article. Still, it's a very very good prediction as for 60's.
To add to his "predictions": Golem XIV is a philosophical desciption of technological singularity (from 80's), and his Summa Technologiae (from 60's) tackles a ton of then veeery novel stuff, like Machine Learning (a precise description even for today's standards), SETI research, VR, AI, and all of that in a "scientific" way, i.e. concreete and directly based on then published papers, and not simply made as an effect of extrapolation of then current trends (sort-a what Asimov liked doing)
You have to love a book where one of the superweapons is a top level security cert revocation...
Also predictions about automating boring and mundane human tasks:
Waldemar Kaempffert, 1950: "When Jane Dobson cleans house she simply turns the hose on everything... After the water has run down a drain in the middle of the floor (later concealed by a rug of synthetic fiber) Jane turns on a blast of hot air and dries everything."
"With the advent of frozen foods in the shape of bricks, cooking as an art is only a memory in the minds of old-people. A few die-hards still broil a chicken or roast a leg of lamb, but <by using ingredients in frozen bricks> Jane Dobson can serve a steak in less than three minutes, and an elaborate multi-course meal never takes more than half an hour to prepare.
"discarded linens and underwear are recycled and turned into candy."
Isaac Asimov, 1964: "Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare 'automeals,' heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on."
Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (HHGTTG) is a pocket electronic book that contains all the accumulated knowledge about the universe. In the BBC TV series broadcast in 1981, the HHGTTG was represented by a 'computer graphics' aesthetic which was entirely hand animated. The animations still hold up brilliantly (and are better than the animations in the 2005 film).
'A few hundred yards further on Lazy shied again, not from a snake this time but from an unexpected noise. Don pulled him in and spoke severely. "You bird-brained butterball! When are you going to learn not to jump when the telephone rings?"
Lazy twitched his shoulder muscles and snorted. Don reached for the pommel, removed the phone, and answered.'
Nothing unusual there - except that this was published in 1951. Heinlein was extrapolating one particular technology trend and got it spot-on, 60+ years before it happened.
There are so many others - H.G.Wells' 'World Brain' for one (aka the Web)
My favorite phone technology miss was their total absence from Gibson's _Neuromancer_, something that he's a little chagrined about, and tired of hearing about, too . . .
Also, Ender's Game was written in 1984 - the idea of networks wasn't so new then, but I agree that Card had a very prescient take on Locke and Demonsthenes' influence over world politics.
- The Hound, an automated drone for assassinations
- Seashells, in-ear music playing
- Large flat-screen TVs playing reality soaps that the viewer interacts with
If you could figure that out, I think it alone would result in us learning more about our solar system in a couple of years than we have to date. You could send small probes at pretty much everything you wanted and either have a very small amount of buffer memory or just transmit it real time back. You could also have real-time, or much closer to real-time, control of rovers!
Stuff that has come to be:
- Small portable computers (tablets, smart phones)
- Personal communicators (cellular telephones, smart phones)
- 3D printing
- Video phones
- Westinghouse M-27 Phased Plasma Pulse Rifle for fighting Sky... wait we don't have this one yet.
Just to spite me, I'm sure, that was the very first of many Sci-Fi predictions that became reality for me. I read a write-up on lasers in Popular Electronics as early as 1963.
Popular Electronics, July 1963 "Lasers -- The Light Fantastic"
Star Trek the original series 1966.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_door
“In 1954, Dee Horton and Lew Hewitt invented the first sliding automatic door. The automatic door used a mat actuator. In 1960, they co-founded Horton Automatics Inc and placed the first commercial automatic sliding door on the market.[4]”
And not just flat panel displays, but capacitive touch screens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchscreen#History
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat-panel_display#History
Alas, I don't see tricorders happening soon, because they're "action movie" tools. That is, looking from economical and social POV, almost every use case for a tricorder would be better handled by a team of specialists with heavy equipment, and not in a hurry. Real life is boring this way, and technology in the real world isn't about empowering indivduals - at least not in any way that conflicts with the mundane.
[1] https://tricorder.xprize.org/prizes/tricorder [2] https://tricorder.xprize.org/prizes/tricorder/articles/famil...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud
The book is only so-so as a novel but it is compelling in terms of ideas.
Technologically enabled immortality (in an interesting manner).
Massive, crystalline data storage.
Immersive gaming, including the negative, subsuming aspects of same.
The individual as radical.
The radical as an essential component of long-term planning and viability.
That would tie into Clarke's story well (originally in several forms, that got consolidated into "The City and the Stars" with a 1952 copyright. And he would have been in a position (scientifically active) to have encountered it.
I don't know that any such thing happened. But, it was an interesting coincidence to run across that comment. (Sorry, I don't have it to hand.)
What's the line between predicting and inventing?
Maybe the Patent Office accepts concepts, but that leads to nothing but trouble. The real work to inventing is getting something to actually work. Anybody can have an idea, ideas are a dime a dozen.
Perhaps, but definitions don't have to be practical nor rational. Vocabulary is typically driven by common usage (language), not by logic. I'm just the messenger.