How do we know that it's a prediction rather than an influence on how things have turned out? After all, Stephenson has been a very popular author among those

How do we know that it's a prediction rather than an influence on how things have turned out? After all, Stephenson has been a very popular author among those in the CS/AI/ML world for a long time. Furthermore, "conversations" with machines have been a model for human-AI interaction for a very long time. Stephenson didn't invent that idea.