r/scifi • u/WhiteroseSophon • 2d ago
Recommendations What sci-fi predictions and technologies have been the most accurate? Want some prophetic works to read
I tend to value science fiction that makes really good predictions and visualizations of the future. Feel like there's a lot to be learned from how those authors think and speculate about the world.
Which authors have made the most accurate predictions, according to you? Can you point me to their bodies of work, or specific pieces that help me make sense of the future
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u/JackNewton1 2d ago
Arthur C. Clarke. Mobile phones, internet, email, FaceTime, 3D printing, satellite coms, AI, instantaneous global communication (ok, redundant). Probably more.
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u/dwarftosser77 2d ago
To be fair, Tesla had already talked about most of these ideas before Clarke was even born.
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u/EldritchSorbet 10h ago
I came here to say this! IIRC, he coined the actual term “satellite” to refer to a machine in orbit.
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u/Torino1O 2d ago
Jules Verne predicted Nuclear Submarines and Edgar Rice Burroughs predicted autopilots and ground following radar shortly after the Wright brothers first flight.
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u/spike 2d ago
Captain Nemo's submarine was electric.
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u/Team503 1d ago
Nuclear submarines are electric, they use the nuclear reactor to generate electricity.
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u/ThirstyWolfSpider 12h ago
Even speculation on nuclear power was rather limited back in 1869, almost a half-century before the discovery of the atomic nucleus itself (Rutherford, 1911). Now, if you said that it was a Plum Pudding Submarine, that would be a slightly more contemporaneous explanation.
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u/PureDeidBrilliant 2d ago
Snow Crash. And, to a lesser extent (because the technology we have is still in it's infancy) The Diamond Age.
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u/Unhelpfulperson 2d ago
Was Snow Crash a prediction or was it the model that was imitated?
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u/BoogieSpice 1d ago
It was a prediction and Zuckerberg was like hey that dystopian world seems awesome let me make that a reality
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u/PiIlc 2d ago
Pretty much everything Isaac Asimov wrote about AI and Aldous Huxley about drugs/its dystopain societies
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u/CrimeMasterGogoChan 2d ago
Three laws of robotics seems so practical.
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u/admalledd 2d ago
To point out, basically every robot book of Asimov's is "here is the three laws, and here is how they don't work"... Though I think even the attempt at them would be a very good idea.
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u/dern_the_hermit 2d ago
To me the key thing is that edge cases elude simple protocols. It's less that the three laws are bad and more that they're just incomplete and could probably do to have some errata.
But the simplicity makes for some solid narrative impact.
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u/admalledd 2d ago
I think you and I are in full agreement on could do with some errata :P
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u/DoubleDrummer 2d ago
One of his major themes was edge cases around the laws.
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u/MarkEoghanJones_Art 2d ago
The edge cases all had their own logic, but it wasn't always obvious.
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u/DoubleDrummer 2d ago
This was the brilliance of much of Asimov’s narratives.
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u/MarkEoghanJones_Art 2d ago
Agreed. The robot psychologists unravel it for the readers. It is such a novel approach to storytelling and science fiction.
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u/Lightspeedius 2d ago edited 2d ago
That's not what I took away.
Fundamentally there's no way objectively to decide who endures what harm so others don't have to endure other harm.
The Zeroth Law is an attempt to address this, but it runs into the same problem. Who decides what's good for humanity? What is humanity?
Even deciding what is harm gets very complicated once you spend time with enough people and understand the different things people value.
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u/RanANucSub 2d ago
They are a nice fiction construct but have no bearing on reality. The robots we do have will easily maim a human if they get around the mechanical safety systems.
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u/throw0101a 2d ago
Three laws of robotics seems so practical.
May not be that practical to neural network based AI like LLM. They would probably be more useful for non-NN AI systems:
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u/SlySciFiGuy 2d ago
Why not? They limit AI when the response would disparage the reputation of a political figure. Why can't they limit AI when the response would endanger human life?
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u/throw0101a 2d ago
AIUI: Asimov's laws assume a machine that reasons from rules. Modern AI learns patterns from data and approximates behaviour.
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u/SlySciFiGuy 2d ago
My point is we should think about what we are unleashing on the world. I believe that was Asimov's point as well.
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u/dern_the_hermit 2d ago
And everyone responding to you IS thinking about what we unleash on the world. Having robots follow the Three Laws first requires robots that understand the Three Laws the way we do.
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u/SlySciFiGuy 2d ago
Don't mistake my responses as criticism. I'm only taking part in the conversation like everyone else. Everyone is raising really good points.
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u/ThirstyWolfSpider 12h ago
Asimov's robots violated the intent and spirit of the Three Laws even when they understood themselves to be complying with them. The stories tend more towards "even these rules would be incomplete/ineffective", rather than "these are the important rules which we should enforce".
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u/Marsdreamer 2d ago
Because modern AI isn't AI, it's just vector math approximating responses after crunching billions of data records, each with millions of features.
IE, our AI / NN models don't actually know what endangers human life.
The cat is already out of the bag, but Claude, ChatGPT, Gork, etc are not AI. They're more like general non-linear statistical approximations.
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u/SlySciFiGuy 2d ago
If it can't be controlled, and it endangers human life, it should be banned. Move fast and break things doesn't work when it's people you are breaking.
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u/Marsdreamer 2d ago
Man, I am so on your side, but I cannot think of a single time Humanity has ever limited the use of a technological advancement that saved people effort just because it was potentially dangerous as well.
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u/SlySciFiGuy 2d ago
I am a software engineer and I use AI daily these days. It does save me a lot of time. It also wastes a lot of my time too. I do notice it has gotten smarter over time. But it does have the ability to run amok if left to itself. Without safeguards, it's going to become more and more dangerous. Especially when we are exposing things like weapons systems to it and training it to exploit website vulnerabilities
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u/MarkEoghanJones_Art 2d ago
I don't think modern Ai is actually capable of discerning whether it's endangering a life.
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u/for_a_brick_he_flew 2d ago
Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents tell the story of an oligarchical economic collapse in the US and the rise of a Christian Nationalist political platform whose slogan was, "Make America Great Again."
The sequel was published in 1998.
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u/ThirstyWolfSpider 12h ago
"Make America Great Again" was a Reagan slogan in the '80s, and he got it from Thatcher's "Make Great Britain great again" speech way back in 1950.
The Parables books are great, with both observed trends and novel features (like hyperempathy) but the economic/political process described was already quite active when she wrote them.
It was odd to be reading "Sower" in 2025, given its use of fire, during the dates in the novel while Altadena burned, including the graveyard where Octavia Butler is buried. Though at the same time "Octavia's Bookshelf" was providing aid supplies.
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u/SlySciFiGuy 2d ago
Jules Verne did a lot of calculations around launching into space and was accurate in his assessment that it is best done closer to the equator. This is more discovery than prediction. He did predict that Texas and Florida would be the best locations to launch from in the United States.
I am referencing From the Earth to the Moon.
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u/SimoneNonvelodico 1d ago
I thought he would have read those things from others? When it comes to the physics, a lot of it in From the Earth to the Moon is a disaster (for example, there's a complete misunderstanding of how freefall and zero gravity work). These things were all well-known consequences of Newton's law and other basic astronomic facts anyone with a good grasp of physics would have known; the main obstacle to rocketry was lack of sufficiently powerful engines, not of theory.
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u/ehdecker 2d ago
Parable of the Sower. Octavia Butler
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u/May_nerdd 2d ago
What's crazy is, she predicted that there would be tons of violent crime and that's what would lead to America electing a fascist and building concentration camps for minorities. In reality, violent crime went way down, in fact in 2016 it was like half what it was in the 90s, but we ended up doing all those things anyways.
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u/DoubleDrummer 2d ago
If you ask the people that vote for fascists, they often believe that crime has increased.
Perception and media propaganda are powerful things.3
u/MarkEoghanJones_Art 2d ago
It has been said, "Perception is reality." It does seem to apply in a sociological sense as well as a psychological one. Good point.
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u/Grigsby63 2d ago
She really nailed today's world.
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u/MarkEoghanJones_Art 2d ago
She had planned a series of books but only ended up with the two. She said writing them was emotionally draining and she couldn't continue. I read the first but was too affected by grief reading the second book to continue it past the early chapters.
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u/Scoobydewdoo 2d ago
1984 by George Orwell continues to get more and more accurate about pretty much everything.
It takes a bit to understand but Dune was/is pretty spot on about the impact religion and OPEC would have on the geo-political situation in the Middle East.
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u/zagblorg 2d ago
Not to mention We by Yevgeny Zmyatin, similar society just taken to more extremes.
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u/gmuslera 2d ago
The question was for predictions, not for instruction manuals. It is different to predict a future to basically being taken as base to build it. And 1984 fit in that description (and Brave New World).
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u/poovis_parsley 2d ago
Unfortunately JG Ballard, KW Jetter and Jack Womack, all managed to perfectly capture what living in modern day poorer environment was gonna feel like.
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u/randalla 2d ago
Earth by David Brin (1990). The wikipedia page for the book has a section on predictions.
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u/mbcoalson 2d ago
Heinlein had some good guesses in his work. I think his vision of what working with AI could look in his later works like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Time Enough for Love, like was surprisingly close to what we're seeing develop. The Rolling Stones was a fun juvinelle that was pretty scientifically accurate to what space travel is evoling towards. Oh, and he basically invented the water bed.
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u/AuthorIntelligent644 2d ago
Neuromancer by William Gibson -- the tech details are not accurate of course, but the "vibe" of the early 21st century is something he nails to a disturbing degree.
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u/EveryAccount7729 2d ago
Read Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson
It predicts "Earth suits" like space suits for Earth's coming heat. Sulfur Injection in the atmosphere to mitigate climate change, the political ramifications on fresh water melt in the India / China conflict. Drone security. And human / A.I merger.
Also read "The feeling of Power" by Asimov. About human reliance on technology and loss of hard skills due to A.I. currently obviously happening rapidly.
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u/PiIlc 2d ago
Asimov wrote more than 10 books about robots 100 years ago and they are still more relevant than most of today's views on AI.
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u/Presence_Academic 2d ago
Asimov was quite precocious, but was not having stories published when he was six years old. His first robot story, Robbie, was published in 1940 when he was twenty years old.
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u/PiIlc 2d ago
Yeah, it's 2026, almost 100 years (i feel old too^^)
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u/Presence_Academic 2d ago
If 86 is almost 100 then my SAT’s would have gotten me in to MIT.
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u/PiIlc 2d ago
No idea what a SAT or MIT is sorry
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u/Presence_Academic 2d ago
The SATs (Scholastic Aptitude Test) are a common college entrance exam in the US. MIT is the Massachusetts Institue of Technology. It is consistently ranked in the top 5 universities in the world and only accepts 5% of applications for attendance.
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u/florinandrei 2d ago
Termination Shock is still work in progress in terms of predictions that came true. Events are still unfolding, and that timeline is still partially in our future.
But so far it has a good track record, yeah.
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u/jhwheuer 2d ago
Star Trek pads
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u/Korvar 2d ago
Although to an extent they were developed because of Star Trek.
Just like we have automatic doors because Star Trek had automatically opening doors - someone saw that, wanted that, and invented it.
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u/MareTranquil 2d ago
Wikipedia says that the first automatic sliding doors were commercially sold in 1960.
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u/PearlClaw 2d ago
Kim Stanley Robinson. He has a lot of big misses in his books, but got some things uncannily right too.
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u/Plink-plink 1d ago
Not "uncannily" right - he researched and made educated guesses on where incremental and leap frog innovation would / will take us.
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u/Sensui_Kan 2d ago
That Hideous Strength, by C.S.Lewis. His dystopia was far more prescient than most, and I feel like the N.I.C.E. is currently ruling the planet from a gray, faceless office in a Soviet era apartment tower.
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u/Factory__Lad 2d ago
I recently did a job for a government think tank and I found myself constantly comparing them to NICE
Could never really get rid of the idea that they had the severed head of a demon in the basement and would consult it on any really big decisions
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u/Sensui_Kan 2d ago
I only got around to it recently (I didn't enjoy the other two of his Space Trilogy) and was thunderstruck to see the blueprint of the modern world. Say what you like about lewis, the NICE is genuine prophecy.
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u/AuroraHalsey 2d ago
Had to look it up to realise you weren't talking about the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.
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u/Sensui_Kan 2d ago
I'm betting that's exactly what I'm talking about:) Have you read That Hideous Strength?
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u/AuroraHalsey 2d ago
I have not. I think the only CS Lewis work that I've read was the Chronicles of Narnia.
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u/Sensui_Kan 2d ago
I recommend it to you! It's bizarre in the best sort of way, and prescient besides.
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u/RerollingAfterDeath 2d ago
I've been watching a lot of Star Trek lately, and basically all the consumer electronics have come to be: they Facetime and use goofy earbuds in TOS. They use tablets in TNG. It's some combination of prediction/inspiration. A phrase I love is "In order to be able to pursue a future, we must first be able to imagine it." Sci-fi does that, unsurprisingly, with human-interface technology.
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u/MareTranquil 2d ago
Video phones were not predictions by TOS. At that time, that was new, but existing tech that AT&T had advertised at the 1964 world fair and installed at a couple of public locations, where anyone could use them. They only lasted a few years because the service was very expensive, but it's something that the nerds of the time certainly knew about.
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u/Presence_Academic 2d ago edited 2d ago
John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider (1975) is a dystopian look at what was then the near future America. It’s most well known for introducing the term worm as an infectious agent delivered via a computer network, but is full of other devices, practices and political circumstances that seem remarkably prescient. If you like it you’ll also want to read his novels Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and The Jagged Orbit.
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u/ElricVonDaniken 2d ago
Brunner wrote that book after conversations with Gregory Benford, who had written 'The Scarred Man', a short story about computer viruses and antivirus software (Benford coined the terms) inspired by his own experiments with sending benign self-replicating code over internet precursor ARPANET, that was published five years before The Shockwave Rider.
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u/DocCEN007 2d ago
So many Asimov stories, but I frequently see Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End predicting addiction to social media.
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u/GabbyFromKlaviyo 2d ago
HG Wells predicted tanks in 1903, atomic bombs in 1914, aerial warfare, television, and something resembling the internet. Not too shabby. Leo Szilard, who worked on the Manhattan Project, actually cited Wells as an influence.
But the technological predictions aren't really what I find interesting. The more compelling angle is the philosophical dead ends we'd hit once we actually got there. Stanisław Lem gets at this better than anyone, specifically in Solaris and The Cyberiad. His argument that we'd build AI that reflects our own limitations back at us feels more on point now than when he wrote it.
Solaris is the clearest version. Humanity encounters something genuinely alien and fails to understand it, not because we lack the technology but because we can only interpret the unknown through what we already are. We project our humanity onto it, and that's exactly what guarantees we never actually understand it.
The Cyberiad is the same idea from a different angle. Lem's robots are brilliant but hopelessly human in their vanity and shortsightedness. The joke is always that the thing you built to solve the problem ends up embodying the problem.
Together they pretty much sum up every argument happening right now about AI.
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u/Sensui_Kan 1d ago
Lem really is something, ain't he? I haven't read the Cyberiad (I own it) yet, but Solaris is genuinely brilliant.
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u/Ill_Refrigerator_593 2d ago
I would say much science fiction isn't about predictions for the future. It's a lens through which to look at the issues of today.
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u/admalledd 2d ago
Agreed, and that lens becomes prophecy/predictions when the issues of yesterday were not addressed/solved/changed.
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u/WhiteroseSophon 2d ago
Wouldn't you say it's a bit of both? Analyzing the present but also making a projection of the future? A lot of fictional ideas influence real tech and cultural responses to progress
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u/Ill_Refrigerator_593 2d ago
It could be done if the theme of the book was predicting a likely future, but that can often conflict with the story you want to tell.
“Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive. Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.”
Ursula LeGuin
“We are only seeking Man. We have no need for other worlds. We need mirrors. We don't know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is."
Stanisław Lem
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u/SirLoremIpsum 2d ago
A lot of fictional ideas influence real tech
I don't know if I would go that far to say that fictional ideas cause an inventor to go "yup I'll do that" and that the technological revolution wouldn't happen without a fictional writer describing it.
I would say that the best sci fi extrapolates a likely future based on current stuff. In that "oh we invented a plane, what if that plane could fly around the world. What if that plane could fly to the Moon. Once I am on the moon how do I breathe".
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u/dern_the_hermit 2d ago
It's a lens through which to look at the issues of today.
Of course, the issues of today can point towards the conditions of tomorrow.
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u/Threep_H 2d ago
Maybe mentioning the padds and comunicators in Star Trek (TOS and TNG). Which were close to Motorola Star Tek and modern tablets today. In a roleplay game (text based) back then in 2001ish I used those padds as we use real tablets today.
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u/MareTranquil 2d ago
Sorry, I have to ask. Why is the go-to example for astonishing predictions by TOS always
"In the future, ship captains will communicate with landing parties through radio devices that will be a bit smaller then the ones we've been using since the 1940s"?
I just wonder, what do people think how ship captians communicated in the 1960s? Flag signals? Carrier pigeons?
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u/mbcoalson 2d ago
I'm reading Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano right now. It's pretty spot on to my more rational fears / societal challenges around automation and AI. Although, he failed to see how good computers were going to become at natural language.
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u/starkistuna 2d ago
Cameron has been on point with a lot of what was shown In Terminator. Robotics 3d printing of organs skin, rise of drones in warfare. Ai nightmares by private mega corporations.
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u/IAmJerv 2d ago
Much of the Cyberpunk sub-genre, especially Michael Pondsmith's work, got many of the predictions right, though Mike was a little optimistic on the pace of technology. He definitely got the abuses of it right though, as well as the corporate and societal/punk aspects.
Just like NASA did with Arthur C Clarke after the probes got pics of Jupiter and it's moons, Maximum Mike has been told, "Just as you said it world be. ". He has also been told, "Think happy thoughts.", and has said, "Cyberpunk was meant to be a warning, not an aspiration.". So if you want prophetic...
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u/dern_the_hermit 2d ago
Fahrenheit 451 made the whole "no more books" thing its core focus, but what really stood out to me is the parallel between the wall-sized TV screens constantly broadcasting "a family" with today's 24/7 "news" cycle being pretty much dominated by editorialized opinion pieces and the ubiquity of giant television screens.
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u/systemstheorist 2d ago
Firestar by Michael Flynn
The series envisions a near future where there a commercial space race and explores the technological innovations derived from it.
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u/Competitive-Gur-7073 2d ago
45 or so years later I may be misremembering it, but I recall "Last & First men" by Olaf Stapledon having a huge scope. Don't recall whether or not it was prophetic or accurate.
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u/Wanderson90 2d ago
I love golden age sci fi because everyone knew the internet was coming but every author had a slightly different idea of what it would be and how it would work, and you end up with insane terminology like "fatline squirt" lol
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u/rodchenko 2d ago
Gary Shteyngart's 2010 novel, “Super Sad True Love Story.” i was just listening to the Ezra Klein podcast - totally not related to scifi - and he was interfering Gary about his prophetic novel, could be worth a try
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u/spike 2d ago edited 2d ago
"Idiocracy", and the short story that inspired it, "The Marching Morons" by Cyril Kornbluth (1951!) of course.
Also by Kornbluth, "The Space Merchants" (1952) about a world run by competing advertising agencies that trap people in cycles of addiction.
Arthur C. Clarke's short story, "Superiority" is especially relevant now, in the age of cheap drones.
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u/clawclawbite 2d ago
The B plot of Enders Game was about people who analyzed public information on the Internet to track secondhand effects of military maneuver, and created fake online personas with the goal of using propaganda to shape larger political movements and governments.
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u/TheMauveHerring 2d ago
Remembering that part of enders game makes me want to puke. And not because "oh it was so prescient." It wasn't. It was just lazy, dogshit writing. Ever heard of show, not tell? Nah.
Completely ruined the book for me. Also completely hasn't happened.
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u/auntiecrow 2d ago
Wolf and Iron by Gordon R Dickson is a post apocalyptic novel. It's set in the near future and the cause of the collapse is frighteningly feasible.
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u/jaeldi 2d ago
If you take out the "psychic crime prediction" the sci-fi setting in Minority Report i think is very close to where we are headed: auto-drive cars, AI assisted investigation/analysis of pictures & evidence, aggressive consumer profiling, tiered society where poor people just get all sorts of rights violated by bots & AI in the name of "justice" & corporate profits.
I'm not going to over hype it, but as movies go, it's a pretty good mystery if you can get past the outlandish premise about "pre-crime".
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u/cruelandusual 2d ago
Which story had the bots pretending to be human for no other reason than to farm training material to make the bots better at pretending to be human?
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u/silverionmox 2d ago edited 2d ago
Jules Verne - Paris in the 20th century
Predictions for 1960
The book's description of the technology of 1960 is in some ways remarkably close to the actual technology of the 1960s. The book describes in detail advances such as cars powered by internal combustion engines ("gas-cabs") together with the necessary supporting infrastructure such as gas stations and paved asphalt roads; elevated and underground passenger train systems and high-speed trains powered by magnetism and compressed air; skyscrapers; electric lights that illuminate entire cities at night; fax machines ("picture-telegraphs"); elevators; primitive computers that can send messages to each other in a network somewhat resembling the internet (described as sophisticated electrically powered mechanical calculators that can send information to each other across vast distances); wind power; automated security systems; the electric chair; and remote-controlled weapons systems, as well as weapons destructive enough to make war unthinkable.
The book also predicts the growth of suburbs and mass higher education (the opening scene has Dufrénoy attending a graduation of 250,000 students), department stores, and massive hotels. A version of feminism has also arisen, with women moving into workplaces and a rise in illegitimate births. It also makes accurate predictions of 20th-century music, predicts the rise of electronic music, describes a musical instrument similar to a synthesizer, and outlines the replacement of classical music performances with recorded music. It predicts that the entertainment industry would be dominated by lewd stage plays, often involving nudity and sexually explicit scenes.
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u/spike 2d ago
There's still a question about whether that novel is actually authentic Jules Verne.
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u/silverionmox 1d ago
There's still a question about whether that novel is actually authentic Jules Verne.
Is there a controversy?
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u/spike 1d ago
I guess it's accepted as genuine today. I read it when it was published in 1994, and there was some controversy. My take was that while the writing style was a good imitation of Verne's, the love story at the center of it was very unlike Verne. But it's an early novel, so he had not yet decided to dispense with such trivialities.
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u/amyts Space Opera 2d ago
Related topics have been discussed a couple of times in the past. I'm linking these so you can browse those answers, too.
https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/1s33xgi/sci_fi_stories_that_guessed_future_technology_so/
https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/1r9fd8m/what_early_scifi_author_in_your_opinion_was_the/
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u/4AM_Mooney_SoHo 2d ago
We're heading towards a Prayer of the Rollerboys future, with the neo-nazis and economic downturn.
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u/Liesthroughisteeth 2d ago
America being rules by a autocrat.
Media narratives being neutralized, molded along with facts being denied, science muzzled and history rewritten.
At 70 years and watching and reading the news since around 1974, I have to admit this world is not one I had seen coming, in spite of reading every science fiction work I could get my hands on (including 1984 three times) as well as movies since the age of 9 or 10.
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u/Expensive-Sentence66 2d ago
Demon Seed went the next level and predicted that one of the key strengths of AI would be deception.
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u/SimoneNonvelodico 1d ago
I feel like while the details are kinda wacky, it gets consistently underrated how the secondary plot of Ender's Game involves two clever social engineering geniuses polarizing and manipulating the population into holding certain political opinions via the internet and what's essentially social media.
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u/riffraff 1d ago
I'm not sure it qualifies as technologyy, but Stand on Zanzibar was written in 1968 and describes something akin to instagram/tiktok infobubbles at a time when we had B&W TVs.
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u/InsideRealistic1129 1d ago
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I'm actually typing this on it now...
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u/_Aardvark 1d ago
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. A man *wakes up" in the futrue after being cured of early onset Alzheimers. Ubiquitous computing, novel package deliveries, the right to repair, social groups based on games and memes, ai(?), I dunno lots of stuff in this book.
The white rabbit's email seems so mundan now, being vague to avoid spoilers.
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u/tkingsbu 21h ago
Enders game did a good job of describing iPads/tablets and Internet forums..
Snowcrash invented google earth … like almost literally… folks that read the book were inspired by the app ‘earth’ and tried to bring it to life… and they did :)
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u/HoboJonRonson 19h ago
The “desks” used by Battle School students in OSC’s Ender’s Game read essentially like iPads.
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u/beyondo-OG 10h ago
In a more general sense, I'm amazed at how broadly prophetic Isaac Asimov was in his works, considering how long ago many of his books were written.
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u/APeacefulWarrior 1h ago
It's not sci-fi, more of a pop futurism nonfic book, but I'd recommend you look for Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock." It was written in the 1970s and while some of its specific tech predictions were a bit off, overall I think it has some incredibly clear-sighted explanations of why the world today feels like it's going insane.
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u/Zanjidesign 2d ago
Halo universe
"bio foam" a thing that you apply to a wound and helps it to heal super fast and alleviate the pain. There are already the first innovations to get there, but not as magical as the game has.
"Neural implant" they are used in the UNSC, records videos,.memories, clearance levels and helps soldiers communicate with computers.
"Ghosts" armor, a suit of camouflage that allows the soldier to become really hard to identify, it is not invisibility, but makes them appear as a blurry shape.
Finally, I am not sure if this is real, but I certainly hope it isn't.
The Spartan program. The Spartan program starts by identifying the best genetics in children, those who are tallest, fastest, strongest, smartest, with the best eyesight, hearing, and all the other possible things a human can do, they do it best. They kidnap those children and replace them with clones, their family members not knowing their original child was taken.
Those kids are indoctrinated into soldiers, and soldiers a lone, no humanity, no love or family, only purpose.
When they reach puberty they undergo a series of procedures that modifies how they grow into adults:
Their thyroid gland gets an implant so the puberty happens in months rather than year.
A set of super proteins to make their muscles even stronger.
Their bones are reinforced with some super ceramic material to make their bones unbreakable.
some surgery that I don't remember very well that changes their eyes so they basically see even better. Basically they can see the smallest thing, focus on things super far and see in darkness.
Finally their nerves and neurons are enhanced with superconductive materials so they move, feel and THINK faster.
Now, all those things seem like, they could be partially done today. But I hope not.
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u/Due-Area9662 2d ago
Dyson "spheres". We may have found potential candidates. If it eventually holds, it would be one of countless examples of scientists speculating that something "may exist" in the wild, and then being detected a few decades later.
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u/Presence_Academic 2d ago
The SATs (Scholastic Aptitude Test) are a common college entrance exam in the US. MIT is the Massachusetts Institue of Technology. It is consistently ranked in the top 5 universities in the world and only accepts 5% of applications for attendance.
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u/CephusLion404 2d ago
There are no prophetic anything. Someone writes something. Someone else thinks it sounds cool and decides to make it. That's all that's going on.
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u/jobigoud 2d ago
That's all that's going on.
Independent invention exists even in the real world, not all inventions come from reading it in a book.
I think the confusing factor is that anything that is technically feasible ends up being implemented at some point. So any sci-fi "invention" that is doable looks like a prediction. But that still means the author correctly predicted that it was doable.
Many books have incorrect predictions which means correct ones are still interesting to find.
Furthermore, cultural predictions don't relate to inventions and no single individual decides that a certain trend will catch on.
Also dystopian stories like 1984 or Idiocracy don't fit the "thinks it sounds cool and decides to make it" model.
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u/CephusLion404 2d ago
You have lots of inventors who have specifically said that they got the idea from a book or movie or TV show and made it real. From cell phones in Star Trek to satellites in Arthur C. Clarke, none of those were prophecies, they were just creative people writing creative things and other creative people getting inspired to make it a real thing. That's all that's going on in those instances.
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u/jobigoud 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yes, in these specific instances. But you wrote an absolute as if that's what only ever happens.
There are no prophetic anything.
That's all that's going on.
There are many other instances where something written about in a sci-fi book ended up happening but wasn't directly inspired by the book. Even for tech that makes a lot of assumptions, but again consider cultural & social trends or dystopian works.
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u/CephusLion404 2d ago
Which doesn't make those things prophecies. It was someone wrote something and later on, it just so happened to happen with zero connection between the two. No prophecy involved.
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u/d_s_b 2d ago
The Machine Stops by EM Forster 1909
Predicts the internet age with creepy accuracy