This is the script of my national network radio report yesterday on
how science fiction informs us about the past and possible futures of
technology, in both their positive and negative aspects. As always,
there may have been a few minor wording variations from this script as I
presented this report live on air.
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So yeah it's interesting how we tend to connect science fiction with
the real world of technology, and especially the interplay of how much
sci-fi gets right and how much it gets very wrong. Now actually the
term science-fiction goes back much further than most people might
think perhaps as far as the mid-19th century -- in any case quite a
ways. Now the term "sci-fi" apparently was coined by Forrest J
Ackerman -- Forry Ackerman -- whom I had the pleasure of knowing, and
he seems to have started using that term back in the mid-20th century,
as a rhyme with hi-fi. And perhaps a bit before that the science
fiction writer Robert Heinlein and perhaps others were using the term
"sci-fict" as a shorthand for science fiction -- sci-fi does sound
better.
Now of course sci-fi has often tried to be predictive and often in the
nature of a warning about technological pitfalls and their effects on
society. And these run the gamut from explicitly predictive works like
H.G. Wells' "Things to Come" to rather depressing works like "Reefs of
Space" by Williamson and Pohl -- in that one a significant portion of
the population were forced to wear locked steel collars that
authorities could detonate as they saw fit. And of course the list is
very, very long. A very early and incredibly prophetic work is called
"The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster in 1909, a very dark story which
actually did predict things like video calling, tele-education, remote
medical diagnostics and much more.
There are also some rather unexpected media cases of accurate
predictions also. A 1957 issue of "Mad Magazine" predicted use of fake
backgrounds on video calls to try make it look as if the person is
somewhere they actually aren't. The early 60s animated series "The
Jetsons" accurately predicted video tele-medicine and even a camera
pill that could be swallowed for diagnostic purposes -- both of which
exist now of course! Some classic science-fiction portrayals are also
right on the mark. If you look at the flat TV screens in the original
1966 film "Fahrenheit 451" they look essentially exactly, including
aspect ratio, like big screen TVs we have today.
On the other hand, sci-fi often has blind spots. Asimov apparently
long assumed in his stories that computers would stay very large. You
don't find much classic sci-fi that really predicted the Internet or
even anything much like smartphones. And you don't find many if any
predictions of the rapid deployment of mediocre generative AI systems
being rammed down our throats by profit-hungry Big Tech firms.
Having said that, sometimes sci-fi is more accurate than the hype we
hear from actual big tech firm executives today, because obviously
we're not riding around through high speed underground tubes from city
to city, or yet seeing the mass adoption of privately owned fully
autonomous robocars, that is, no human interaction required to drive
them at all, that some firms predicted by now. Waymo robotaxis that
run in various cities require massive human support to monitor the
cars and have humans take over control remotely when there are
emergencies or in a wide variety of other common situations that the
automation can't handle.
That's not to say that various of these techs won't continue to
advance. But some tech comes much faster than predicted, while the
most hyped tech often seems to come much slower, or if rapidly with
pitfalls that Big Tech doesn't usually like to talk about. And
sometimes hyped techs never see mass deployment and widespread
adoption.
Generally speaking the most accurate sci-fi predictions are the ones
that don't predict rapid change toward a beautiful, all modern "world
of tomorrow" where everyone lives in a technological nirvana. Yet
while it's always important to take sci-fi predictions with more than
a grain of salt, short of civilization's fall, the tech will just keep
coming at us seemingly every day -- whether we want all of it or not.
- - -
L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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