4 ms·
You know science fiction is not real, right?
by ThrowawayTestr 19d ago
You know science fiction is not real, right?
- lioeters 19d agoEverything is imaginary until somebody makes it real.
- bruce511 17d agoFiction is not real, but I would add a "yet" into the sentence. But that's not the point. Science Fiction (speaking generally) takes a specific hypothesis, and then imagines a society that derives from that. For example "The Space Merchants" (Pohl & Kornbluth, 1952) imagined a world run by advertising. Or "Profession" (Azimov, 1957) explores education. I offer these as the tip of a large iceberg. Science Fiction is seldom about science. It's mostly about people and society interacting with that science. It doesn't seek to predict science advances, but rather predict how those advances will affect the society we live in. Sure Terminator isn't real. (And frankly not something I'm terribly worried about.) But the impact of AI on society is real, and that impact will manifest in ways we have predicted (eg the movie Her) and in ways we've not yet explored. What happens when there are no engineers left? Nobody knows how to use a slide-rule anymore because we have machines to do that work. What happens when building a bridge becomes "Claude please design a bridge", which it does then perfectly well? Why should coders, or accountants, or engineers even exist in a world where AI exists? That's the kind of question Science Fiction sets out to answer.