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These articles always remind me of how prescient Star Trek was when it came to technology, and how we really don't have anything like that these days. The last
by redthrowaway 15y ago
These articles always remind me of how prescient Star Trek was when it came to technology, and how we really don't have anything like that these days. The last big SciFi show, Battlestar Galactica, seemed to go out of its way to avoid making any bold tech predictions, and the Star Trek franchise seems to have fizzled out (that movie doesn't count). ST:TOS predicted cloaks just six years after the first laser was ever fired, and 3 years before development began on UNIX. Holograms took until TNG, but they were still a good 20 years early.
I feel like we're getting ripped off. I want radical predictions that I can watch daytime specials on Discovery about in 50 years.
- DrCatbox 15y agoDo you have any ideas or predictions yourself? Maybe I have a weak imagination, but Star Trek and other sci-fi have probably done anything that can be done with any kind of technology we can come up with. Beyond sci-fi is fantasy land, and sci-fi as a genre has reached that border, beyond that its where Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings take over.
- RyanMcGreal 15y agoRelated: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021209.html http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021209.html
- TeMPOraL 15y agoOur imagination expands as our possibilities become greater. Also, there is the 3rd Clarke's law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Sci-fi can easily get into the realm of fantasy (I've already seen a scientifically explained napalm-breathing dragons in 21st century Earth on TV) and vice versa (I've read a story about designing and building spaceships by stacking many layers of different magic onto a wooden ark). The really interesting thing that sci-fi can give us is this: assume that in described world, a selected type of "magic" is possible (handwaving it into a scientificly-sound concept for the sake of the reading experience) and extrapolate the consequences. What can be done with it, and - more important - how will people behave, how will it transform the society. Orson Scott Card did something like this with the Internet in "Ender's Game".
- tsycho 15y ago>> assume that in described world, a selected type of "magic" is possible (handwaving it into a scientificly-sound concept for the sake of the reading experience) and extrapolate the consequences. What can be done with it, and - more important - how will people behave, how will it transform the society. That's my definition of good science fiction. Asimov was the master, but I can't find many others like him. I liked OSC too. Do you have any recommendations?
- TeMPOraL 15y agoI liked Vernor Vinge's "A Fire Upon a Deep". This book is a goldmine of interesting concepts about alien species and their civilisations, completely different from "standard TV aliens". Also "The Trigger" by Arthur C. Clarke - it's a book about how an accidental discovery causes technological change, which transforms life of societies around the world. One of the best books I've ever read.
- redthrowaway 15y agoThe Mote in God's Eye was a great read.
- wladimir 15y ago+1 technology has advanced much since then, but nothing spectacular enough to change SF. What we have is basically faster and smaller computers, and network effects due to global connectivity. There's nothing really new in travel methods (nope, still no flying cars), cities are the same, VR never took off, human-level AI is still far away, we're still fighting for resources (with bullets) and space programs are being dismantled as we speak. So it makes sense that our current sci-fi is still the same as that of the 80-90's.
- egor83 15y agospace programs are being dismantled as we speak. US is not the whole world. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2758221 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2758221 China is going to launch its first mini-space station soon. Yes, they are a few decades behind US/Russia, but they are moving.
- nagrom 15y agoI think you're a little restrictive on scifi by referencing only television. There's a lot of very new scifi published as books - television has maybe dropped away, but read something by Charles Stross, for example. I don't think that such stories would have been popular or feasible in the late 80s. Television as a whole has become much less suited to fantastic ideas or new concepts as a reflection of modern tastes - look at the lack of very good documentaries compared to the late 60s and early 70s, for example, and the proliferation of reality TV shows. A lot of the tech that we have is invisible to you; it's too commonplace to be called wondrous. You casually dismiss commoditized computing resources and global connectivity...the cultural and societal developments arising from these were not expected 20 years ago. We do have flying cars, I think. They're called helicopters and are too dangerous to allow everyone to have one and drive wherever they like. They cost about the same as a high-end sports car. Like a high-end sports car, most of us won't own one, you can't just park them on the street and they cost up to about $500k. We have changed cities hugely! You can buy any food anywhere at anytime regardless of season due to improvements in transport and agriculture technology. Cities are a huge mixture of cultures and nationalities in a way they weren't 20 years ago due to improved communications technology. Public transport is much more reliable - if you want to go somewhere, go to the city website and type in the address; you'll be given a routemap that you can carry on your internet-enabled phone, and in many cities you can track the bus in real time. Use that phone to check where your friends are and meet up spontaneously without worrying about a place's quality, because you checked out a hundred reviews on a location-aware website. How many people could work from coffee shops 20 years ago? Buildings are safer (and smaller), and feature built-in hooks for modern tech to play with. It's not happening fast - but look at how cities 'advanced' in the previous 500 years. You have to temper your expectations, a little. You say that human-level AI is far away - I say that Google can organise and index things better than I could. Mathematical theorems are solved automatically and markets are balanced by intelligences that operate on the nanosecond and picosecond time scales! It's true that a computer won't chat to you, but wouldn't you prefer to talk to a person? VR is similar - it's a societal disinclination, rather than a technological problem. (You can already make a case that augmented reality is here right now.) Space programmes are being dismantled, and new ones are being put into place. I think that space exploration is healthier now than it was in the 90s. Private companies are finally looking like being able to launch spacecraft reliably. SpaceX's Dragon module is the most exciting thing to happen since before the Hubble telescope. All these things are referenced and extrapolated in good, modern scifi - just not on the dying medium that is television. Be more optimistic! :-D (Aside: Can one can make a case that the most popular form of scifi on TV right now is crime drama? Fancy hand-held analyzers map DNA structure and imaging technologies can reconstruct crime scenes from grainy pictures. Network traces track fugitives and the machines seem to finger the perp. automagically - this is not the case in the real world...)
- CapitalistCartr 15y agoTen years from now, robotics, AI, and silicon get good enough that we have a massive robotic revolution, mirroring the Industrial Revolution. Robotics takes the labor out of virtually all production, making capitalism obsolete. The productivity of Capitalism is replaced with creativity. With our World awash in "stuff" too cheap to matter, corporations shrink and disappear, replaced with small groups mirroring today's open source communities. That's just off the top of my head. Today's TV and movie sci-fi are far from challenging the limits of anything. And yeah, this is from a guy with the handle of Capitalist.
- ajuc 15y agoJudging from today state of the art AI - creativity would be automated much earlier than dumb physical jobs. We already have pattern matching and theorem proving software, I think that throwing sheer computing power at hard problem where strict criteria for correctnes are defined would be cheaper than human problem solver. On the other hand mechanical and interfacing side of robot revolution seems to lag after AI research. Teaching robot to run is hard problem, brain has many layers of hardware for doing this, and it's easier to make new human, than it is to make new robot. All in all I predict the exact opposite - unskilled workers will have jobs, creativity in many cases would be automated.
- RyanMcGreal 15y agoI'm not sure that Star Trek was prescient about what we would go on to invent, so much as it actually inspired a generation of inventors.
- sp332 15y agoI'm sure this is true. After all, the transporter was "invented" when the props for the shuttlecraft weren't ready for the first shoot. Someone said, "well, let's just have them appear on the surface" and presto, you've inspired thousands of people to try to create a transporter. And it's a well-known fact that the inventor of the cell phone credited ST's communicators as his inspiration. http://www.editinternational.com/read.php?id=4810edf3a83f8 http://www.editinternational.com/read.php?id=4810edf3a83f8
- khafra 15y agoThere's certainly prescient fiction still--post-cyberpunk; Peter Watts, Charlie Stross[1], Greg Egan, Richard K. Morgan... But the coming technology and culture they're describing is either difficult to show compellingly onscreen, requires an outlier in IQ and education to understand, or is somewhere between disturbing and revolting to people who have no problem with starships and phasers. [1]http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross
- JanezStupar 15y agoForget Star Trek and Galactica. Frank Herbert was the one right. His extrapolation of 20th century is a dystopia and utopia at the same time. But even he couldn't foresee that we will create no-chamber at the start of 21st century.
- randallsquared 15y agoIn the postwar era, we [Americans, though I wasn't born, yet] were hopeful about the future. Our science fiction reflected this, but it was just the tip of the iceberg: the whole culture assumed progress and advancement. Immediately after, though, there was a time of fear and pessimism about the future, bringing the concepts of nuclear winter, climate change, resource shortages, and the end of the space age. We call this period "the 70s", and our current culture seems to be far more influenced by that than it is by the previous expectation of momentum and progress. Also, our basic understanding of physics-as-applied-to-the-limits-of-technology hasn't much changed from 1960 to 2010, unlike the period from 1910 to 1960.
- Florin_Andrei 15y ago> In the postwar era, we [Americans, though I wasn't born, yet] were hopeful about the future. Not just y'all. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2764275 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2764275
- orangecat 15y agowe really don't have anything like that these days Check out Halting State by Charles Stross and Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge.
- Miky 15y agoCharles Stross is definitely an author to read if you're looking for interesting predictions that have a good chance of coming true.
- redthrowaway 15y agoSounds right up my alley. Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check it out.
- Florin_Andrei 15y agoIt seems like a huge wave of optimism and progressive ideas sprang forth during the '60s, producing all the well-known quirks and odds of that decade. Then the whole world seemed to sink back into skepticism and the regular blasé mood. This is as odd as the rampant insanity that took over the world two decades prior to that. The 20th century was very very strange.
- cpeterso 15y agoI've often wondered what kind of science fiction the characters of Star Trek read in the 23rd and 24th century. Star Trek characters always seem to be conveniently interested in 20th century culture.