[ghurtado]

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.

[nottorp]

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.

[burkaman]

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."

[morpheos137]

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

[madaxe_again]

Zamatyin’s We was prescient politically, socially and technologically - but didn’t fall into the trap of everyone being machine men with antennae.

It’s interesting - Forster wrote like the Huxley of his day, Zamyatin like the Orwell - but both felt they were carrying Wells’ baton - and they were, just from differing perspectives.

[anthk]

>The air is poisoned...

That's just the Victorian London.

[dmd]

“A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” ― Frederik Pohl

[6510]

That it has to be believable is a major constraint that reality doesn't have.

[marci]

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.

[ajuc]

Stanisław Lem predicted Kindle back in 1950s, together with remote libraries, global network, touchscreens and audiobooks.

[nottorp]

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?

[arcade79]

Well, there was Ender's Game, it came in '85. Usenet did exist at that point, though. Don't know if the author had encountered it.

The Shockwave Rider was also remarkable prescient.

[ghaff]

Kindles are just books and books are already mostly fairly compact and inexpensive long-form entertainment and information.

They're convenient but if they went away tomorrow, my life wouldn't really change in any material way. That's not really the case with smartphones much less the internet more broadly.

[nottorp]

That was exactly my point.

Funny, I had "The collected stories of Frank Herbert" as my next read on my tablet. Here's a juicy quote from like the third screen of the first story:

"The bedside newstape offered a long selection of stories [...]. He punched code letters for eight items, flipped the machine to audio and listened to the news while dressing."

Anything qualitative there? Or all of it quantitative?

Story is "Operation Syndrome", first published in 1954.

Hey, where are our glowglobes and chairdogs btw?

[nottorp]

Hah, can't resist posting even if this story is old and dead by now.

Went further in Herbert's shorts volume and I just ran into a scene where people are preparing to leave Earth on a colony ship to seed some distant world...

... and they still have human operator assisted phone calls.

[lloeki]

That has to be the most dystopian-sci-fi-turning-into-reality-fast thing I've read in a while.

I'd take smartphones vanishing rather than books any day.

[ghaff]

My point was Kindles vanishing, not books vanishing. Kindles are in no way a prerequisite for reading books.

[KingMob]

Time to create the Torment Nexus, I guess

[varjag]

There's a thriving startup scene in that direction.

[BiteCode_dev]

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.

[notarobot123]

To the proud contrarian, "the empire did nothing wrong". Maybe Sci-fi has actually played a role in the "memetic desire" of some of the titans of tech who are trying to bring about these worlds more-or-less intentionally. I guess it's not as much of a dystopia if you're on top and its not evil if you think of it as inevitable anyway.

[psychoslave]

I don't know. Walking on everybody's face to climb a human pyramid, one don't make much sincere friends. And one certainly are rightfully going down a spiral of paranoia. There are so many people already on fast track to hate anyone else, if they have social consensus that indeed someone is a freaking bastard which only deserve to die, that's a lot of stress to cope with.

Future is inevitable, but only ignorants of self predictive ability are thinking that what's going to populate future is inevitable.

[CamperBob2]

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've been tempted to. "Everything will be terrible if these guys succeed, but at least I'll be rich. If they fail I'll lose money, but since that's the outcome I prefer anyway, the loss won't bother me."

Trouble is, that ship has arguably already sailed. No matter how rapidly things go to hell, it will take many years before PLTR is profitable enough to justify its half-trillion dollar market cap.

[monocasa]

It goes a bit deeper than that since they got funding in the wake of 9/11 and the requests for intelligence and investigative branches of government to do better and coalescing their information to prevent attacks.

So "panopticon that if it had been used properly, would have prevented the destruction of two towers" while ignoring the obvious "are we the baddies?"

[duskdozer]

To be honest, while I'd heard of it over a decade ago and I've read LOTR and I've been paying attention to privacy longer than most, I didn't ever really look into what it did until I started hearing more about it in the past year or two.

But yeah lots of people don't really buy into the idea of their small contribution to a large problem being a problem.

[Lerc]

>But yeah lots of people don't really buy into the idea of their small contribution to a large problem being a problem.

As an abstract idea I think there is a reasonable argument to be made that the size of any contribution to a problem should be measured as a relative proportion of total influence.

The carbon footprint is a good example, if each individual focuses on reducing their small individual contribution then they could neglect systemic changes that would reduce everyone's contribution to a greater extent.

Any scientist working on a method to remove a problem shouldn't abstain from contributing to the problem while they work.

Or to put it as a catchy phrase. Someone working on a cleaner light source shouldn't have to work in the dark.

[duskdozer]

>As an abstract idea I think there is a reasonable argument to be made that the size of any contribution to a problem should be measured as a relative proportion of total influence.

Right, I think you have responsibility for your 1/<global population>th (arguably considerably more though, for first-worlders) of the problem. What I see is something like refusal to consider swapping out a two-stroke-engine-powered tungsten lightbulb with an LED of equivalent brightness, CRI, and color temperature, because it won't unilaterally solve the problem.

[quesera]

> 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 proudly owned zero shares of Microsoft stock, in the 1980s and 1990s. :)

I own no Palantir today.

It's a Pyrrhic victory, but sometimes that's all you can do.

[kbrkbr]

Stock buying as a political or ethical statement is not much of a thing. For one the stocks will still be bought by persons with less strung opinions, and secondly it does not lend itself well to virtue signaling.

[ruszki]

I think, meme stocks contradict you.

[iwontberude]

Meme stocks are a symptom of the death of the American dream. Economic malaise leads to unsophisticated risk taking.

[morkalork]

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!

[pwdisswordfishy]

This is a strange comment. It doesn't even count as unfalsifiable, just unsupported.

Elon Musk has actual children (lots, in fact). If we want to know what he "would" do, we can just look. We don't have to use our imaginations (or entertain the fanciful claims of prognosticators and soothsayers).

[UltraSane]

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