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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

What I find interesting about science fiction is how difficult it is to predict technological progress consistently across different types of technology.

For example, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (written in 1966, set in 2075), space travel and colonization is much more advanced than it is in 2014. Artificial intelligence is also far superior. But digital electronics and computer networking are much more primitive. A portable audio recorder has only an hour or two capacity, and it transmits data by playing the audio sped up through the telephone. PCs don't appear to exist, and computer monitors and terminals are rare. There doesn't appear to be cellular phones or an equivalent. And there's no Internet. An AI system reads books with a scanner and a robotic page-turner.

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"There's no internet" is a rather damning accusation that can be made of practically every sci fi story written up until there was actually internet! And even then, they generally didn't anticipate just how much it would change our lives. Stories set hundreds of years in the future contain computer usage patterns that look primitive within five years of when they're written. Amazing!

I think that in itself is a commentary on just how big a deal the internet is, historically speaking.

I think the classic tropes of science fiction are a product of the era in which they are written:

Starships must have seemed inevitable in a culture that witnessed the aerospace industry progress from its first powered flight to landing on the moon in a few decades.

Androids as stock material and fodder for stories about race issues must surely have come from a culture that didn't see their programming as the hard or interesting part of the question. Now that we know how hard it is, stories set decades in the future are a lot more conservative about how relatable the AIs end up being, what they can do, how human they really are.

The cyberpunk tropes of lone hackers and underground teams outmaneuvering corporations and governments seem to me like a big reflection of the hobbyist PC revolution of the 80s and 90s. They seem quaint now, though.

I found Brin's Existence really refreshing on this front -- the predictions and tropes seem based on looking at technology of today and extrapolating from that. I really enjoyed it!

> I think that in itself is a commentary on just how big a deal the internet is, historically speaking.

I think it's also a testament to how history is sometimes dominated by paradigm shifts rather than gradual change. Sci-fi writers seem reasonably competent at predicting future technology when that technology changes gradually.

> I found Brin's Existence really refreshing on this front -- the predictions and tropes seem based on looking at technology of today and extrapolating from that. I really enjoyed it!

So based on the rest of your post, give it 5 years and you'll find the predictions disappointingly dated.

I think that's mainly because of the incredibly remarkable developments in computer technology.

Since 1966 most industries have seen technological improvements of one or two orders of magnitude, if that. 7% economic growth compounded over 50 years is a growth by factor of 30x.

Data storage per $ has increased by a whopping 8 orders of magnitude, or a factor of 100 million.

Meanwhile, FLOPS/$ has increased by about 11 orders of magnitude, or a factor of 100 BILLION.

That scifi writers were able to get even close to modern technology is amazing. Of course, don't forget that as late as 15 years ago, portable audio players did only have an hour or two of capacity.

I think that has to do with the fact that one discovery or invention leads to a cascade of others. And upon those, yet more cascades of discoveries and inventions.

It's as if technological and scientific advancement was a genome, it's very difficult to predict how it would branch out from a single mutation yielding many new families along the way.

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