Comment by ghurtado
6 days ago
We're literally running out of science fiction topics faster than we can create new ones
If I started a list with the things that were comically sci Fi when I was a kid, and are a reality today, I'd be here until next Tuesday.
Almost no scifi has predicted world changing "qualitative" changes.
As an example, portable phones have been predicted. Portable smartphones that are more like chat and payment terminals with a voice function no one uses any more ... not so much.
The Machine Stops (https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...), a 1909 short story, predicted Zoom fatigue, notification fatigue, the isolating effect of widespread digital communication, atrophying of real-world skills as people become dependent on technology, blind acceptance of whatever the computer says, online lectures and remote learning, useless automated customer support systems, and overconsumption of digital media in place of more difficult but more fulfilling real life experiences.
It's the most prescient thing I've ever read, and it's pretty short and a genuinely good story, I recommend everyone read it.
Edit: Just skimmed it again and realized there's an LLM-like prediction as well. Access to the Earth's surface is banned and some people complain, until "even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject."
There is even more to it than that. Also remember this is 1909. I think this classifies as a deeply mysterious story. It's almost inconceivable for that time period.
-people a depicted as grey aliens (no teeth, large eyes, no hair). Lesson the Greys are a future version of us.
The air is poisoned and ruined cities. People live in underground bunkers...1909...nuclear war was unimaginable then. This was still the age of steam ships and coal power trains. Even respirators would have been low on the public imagination.
The air ships with metal blinds sound more like UFOs than blimps.
The white worms.
People are the blood cells of the machine which runs on their thoughts social media data harvesting of ai.
China invaded Australia. This story was 8 years or so after the Boxer Rebellion so that would have sounded like say Iraq invading the USA in the context of its time.
The story suggests this is a cyclical process of a bifurcated human race.
The blimp crashing into the steel evokes 9/11, 91+1 years later...
The constellation orion.
Etc etc.
There is a central commitee
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“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” ― Frederik Pohl
That it has to be believable is a major constraint that reality doesn't have.
In other words, sometimes, things happen in reality that, if you were to read it in a fictional story or see in a movie, you would think they were major plot holes.
Stanisław Lem predicted Kindle back in 1950s, together with remote libraries, global network, touchscreens and audiobooks.
And Jules verne predicted rockets. I still move that it's quantitative predictions not qualitative.
I mean, all Kindle does for me is save me space. I don't have to store all those books now.
Who predicted the humble internet forum though? Or usenet before it?
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Time to create the Torment Nexus, I guess
There's a thriving startup scene in that direction.
Wasn't that the elevator pitch for Palentir?
Still can't believe people buy their stock, given that they are the closest thing to a James Bond villain, just because it goes up.
I mean, they are literally called "the stuff Sauron uses to control his evil forces". It's so on the nose it reads like an anime plot.
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Saw a joke about grok being a stand-in for Elon's children and had the realization he's the kind of father who would lobotomie and brainwipe his progeny for back-talk. Good thing he can only do that to their virtual stand-in and not some biological clones!
Not at all, you just need to read different scifi. I suggest Greg Egan and Stephen Baxter and Derek Künsken and The Quantum Thief series