And yet good science fiction writers routinely do just that. I think in particular of Forster’s “The Machine Stops.”
What are effective methods for predicting future technology?
This is survivorship bias. Between them all scifi authors predict everything they can imagine, and a few of them happen to get close enough to what happens that they look accurate, and people conveniently forget all the ones who were wildly off the mark.
I see two things going on here.
- Science fiction influencing engineers / scientists.
- Selection bias, how many sci-fo books/movies are completely wrong ? If you produce 100 000 scenarios surely some of them will be more or less comparable to reality.
Did back to the future predict self lacing shoes ? Or did Nike invent self lacing shoes because of back to the future ? &c.