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Do you now of any highly accurate predictions, famous or not, of that time (or any other time for that mather)? Did anyone anticipate today's state of the Inter
by Ygor 16y ago
Do you now of any highly accurate predictions, famous or not, of that time (or any other time for that mather)? Did anyone anticipate today's state of the Internet, Computers or Technology in general?
- dpritchett 16y agoWilliam Gibson? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawl_trilogy#Setting_and_themes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawl_trilogy#Setting_and_them...
- frisco 16y agoThat's different. A generation of engineers and scientists grew up on science fiction of authors like Gibson and deliberately went out to create it.
- tjmaxal 16y agodeliberately? Maybe subconciously
- frisco 16y agoNo, deliberately. I'm one of them. A lot of my friends who are grad students are the same way. Gene Roddenberry, Stephenson, Gibson, and maybe like 5-10 others have probably had more effect on the development of modern technology than Washington has over the past 25 years (ignoring the fact that DARPA has financed a lot of it).
- bitwize 16y agoStephenson got closer to the mark; the world described in Snow Crash is more accurate, more believable, and more fun than Gibson's self-absorbed, nihilistic works. In addition to various technical details (like showing effects of latency and jitter over real-world network links in the Metaverse), Snow Crash presents a confluence of the culture of technology, the culture of the arts, and punk/skater culture that is a reasonable extrapolation of what we see today. It is a marvellously prescient work, especially when you take phenomena like Second Life into account.
- dpritchett 16y agoYou're certainly right about Snow Crash but in Gibson's defense his book came out 8 years earlier.
- stcredzero 16y agoE. M. Forester. He actually predicts something like blogging in The Machine Stops!