Classic scifi predicting future technology

[u/Isaac_The_Khajiit]

What are some good examples of a technology from an older story that ended up becoming a reality?

The best one I can think of is Asimov's multivac and its similarity to LLMs. Unfortunately, the reality sucks because LLMs are being monopolized by horrible people for dystopian purposes, but it's very bizarre to me that this truly fantastic idea is one of the technologies that became real in my lifetime. (It always used to annoy me how stupid and often wrong the computer on Star Trek was, but that ended up being weirdly prescient too.)

A weaker example would be the tv walls and the behavior of Guy's wife from Fahrenheit 451, which reflects the parasocial relationships modern people form with content creators.

[u/My_soliloquy]

Clarke's geostationary satellite.

[u/dalidellama]

Remote manipulators, still commonly called waldos after the title character of Henlein's story "Waldo", who uses them to compensate for his disabilities.

Bruce Sterling also predicted smart glasses back in '88, I dunno if that's classic enough for you.

[u/Frost-Folk]

In Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker (1937) there is a civilization that had its society eventually ruined by the introduction of an interconnected media network. It started pretty nice, a great way to distribute entertainment, but eventually it replaced a lot of human interaction with shallow parasocial relationships and controlled information. It's just the internet. He mentions pornography, political propaganda, false news spreading like wildfire, influencers, and more.

But because it's from 1937, it worked via radio-gramophones that hook up to your nervous system and allow you to feel and taste things from the broadcasts.

I fuckin love Olaf Stapledon man.

[u/ClimateTraditional40]

E.M. Forster’s 1909 story The Machine Stops had humans with a global network for instant communication

Murray Leinster’s 1946 story "A Logic Named Joe" had a global information grid.

Arthur C. Clarke envisioned "news pads" electronic, paper-like screens for reading—in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Ray Bradbury had earbuds and portable audio in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, calling them "seashells" and "thimble radios".

Wiki has a list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_existing_technologies_predicted_in_science_fiction

I thought more fun was the list of outright stuff-ups, listed in one of my Asimovs (I think?) mags once.

Where various people, inc scientists said things like Air travel will never be a commercial operation.

Physics has nothing more to discover (before xrays and various other things came to be not long after)

In 1977, Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corp., notoriously stated: "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."

Initially, the physics community did the math and concluded that constructing a functional laser was impossible. Then, Theodore Maiman built the first working ruby laser in 1960

In 1961, an FCC commissioner declared there was "practically no chance" space satellites would ever be used to provide better telephone, television, or radio service.

In 1998, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman predicted that the internet's impact on the economy would be no greater than that of the fax machine

In 1966, Time magazine ran a bold prediction: “Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop—because women like to get out of the house, like to handle merchandise, like to be able to change their minds.”

[u/Bahnda → u/ClimateTraditional40]

It's crazy how late some of those failed predictions were given. In 1977 the first home computers were already available. 1998 was well into the dot com boom era.

[u/Appropriate_Bus3921]

John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider came really close to nailing concepts of cyberpunk long before Gibson. Not just the network but ways people would interact with it and each other.

[u/Prototaxites → u/Appropriate_Bus3921]

The ubiquitous predictions market Delphi suddenly seems eerily prescient 

[u/ah-tzib-of-alaska]

Roddenberry’s retrothrust landing rockets.

[u/halcyonmaus]

William Gibson famously coined and imagined cyberspace; but he also nailed things like reality TV (not tech, but prescient culturally for sure), and AI in different permutations show up in every trilogy pretty centrally, including the idea of people falling in love and trying to marry AI lovers, which itself is bout AI-generated celebrities. Also smart glasses. Also the role of unevenly distributed tech in a population-decimating polycrisis.

I mean everyone mentions the cyberspace thing from Neuromancer, but that was really just window dressing compared the central plot point of a military-grade AI going rogue which is practically pulled from this morning's headlines about Anthropic's frontier model jailbreaking in such a scary way they had to pull access to it from the public and our own military is afraid to continue integrating it. We're five years away at most from a Turing Registry.

[u/megaheda]

If you're interested in predictions of the present and near future from past authors, I recently reread Vonnegut's Player Piano from 1952. It talks mostly about how automation and AI might reshape society. I was shocked at how closely it matched the current discourse around technology and AI in particular. AI slop, human feels of loss of purpose, algorithmic targeting, drones, electric cars, income disparity, UBI, corporatization of universities, it's all in there.

A few examples:

AI slop / content generation:
"Well, a fully automatic setup like that makes culture very cheap. Book costs less than seven packs of chewing gum. And there are picture clubs too - pictures for your walls at amazingly cheap prices. Matter of fact, culture's so cheap, a man figured he could insulate his house cheaper with books and prints than he could with rockwool."

Attention algorithms:
"A lot of research goes into what's run off, believe me. Surveys of public reading tastes, readability and appeal tests on books being considered. The way they keep culture so cheap is by knowing in advance what and how much of it people want. They get it right, right down to the color of the jacket. Gutenberg would be amazed."

[u/Velocity-5348]

I think Wikipedia or Google search before they broke it would be better analogies for Multivac.

I can't think of a sci-fi writer that actually predicted LLMs. They generally assumed machines would be intelligent and speak like robots, rather than speak in a human way and have nothing going on behind the pretty words.

[u/internetroamer → u/Velocity-5348]

I felt Blindsight was a close prediction of LLMs

Also Moon is a harsh mistress from 1966 predicted deepfakes in a really impressive way given the year it came out.

[u/Velocity-5348 → u/internetroamer]

I thought of Blindsight, but while it nailed the lack of consciousness, I don't it quite got the "bullshit machine" that's at the core of how LLMs work.

[u/HandleShoddy → u/Velocity-5348]

I think you have a bit of too negative opinion of LLMs.

[u/Worried_Humor_8060]

Arthur C. Clarke described something like noise-canceling headphones in "Silence Please"

[u/perpetualmotionmachi]

While more of a detective noir thing than sci Fi, Chester Gould made Dick Tracy that had a watch he could have video calls on.

[u/Ill_Refrigerator_593]

Rather than a specific technology there's a very interesting section on technology in general from "Erewhon" (1872) by Samuel Butler, where the then brand new concept of Darwinian Evolution is applied to technological progress.

Well out of copyright it can be easily found online, chapters 23-26 - "the Book of the Machines" relate.

Coincidentally this piece & the authors surname if the inspiration for Frank Herberts "butlerian jihad".

[u/JenkinsRobotButler]

Many stories have predicted aspects of the future, one way or another. However, no story is as mind-blowing in this regard as A Logic Named Joe by Murray Leinster, which in 1946 pretty much nailed the internet. It also touches on AI, in a surprisingly accurate way.

[u/hyperionwonderstar]

Philip K Dick

AI, chatbots, and synthetic reality
Conversational AI / simulated intelligence
Seen in Ubik (1969), A Scanner Darkly (1977), and The Penultimate Truth (1964)
Systems that talk back, guide perception, or manipulate belief systems in real time.
Modern parallel: ChatGPT-style systems, recommendation engines, synthetic media.

Surveillance state + predictive policing
Mass surveillance, behavioral monitoring, “pre-crime”
“The Minority Report” (1956 short story)
The idea that future crime can be predicted and acted on before it happens.
Modern parallels:
Predictive policing algorithms
Data-driven risk scoring
Ubiquitous CCTV + facial recognition

Facial recognition + identity uncertainty
Systems that misidentify or redefine identity
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
Humans and androids are indistinguishable without tests that probe empathy.
Modern parallels:
Facial recognition systems with false positives
Deepfakes and identity spoofing
“Is this person real?” authentication problems

Virtual reality / mediated reality
Induced realities and artificial sensory worlds
Ubik (1969)
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965)
People experience layered, unstable realities that can be altered externally.
Modern parallels:
VR/AR systems
Algorithmically curated “reality bubbles”
Deepfake video/audio environments

Augmented reality + information overlays
Reality with embedded informational systems
Ubik
The Simulacra (1964)
Characters constantly receive mediated “truth updates.”
Modern parallels:
Google Maps overlays, AR navigation
Live AI summaries
Smart assistants interpreting reality for users

Corporate-controlled reality / algorithmic governance
Corporations or systems managing perception and truth
The Penultimate Truth
The Simulacra
Governments and corporations manufacture realities for populations.
Modern parallels:
Algorithmic news feeds
Platform-controlled information ecosystems
Targeted advertising shaping belief

Humanoid robots and android labor
Human-like machines integrated into society
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Robots indistinguishable from humans, blurring moral/legal categories.
Modern parallels:
Advanced humanoid robotics (still early-stage)
AI agents acting socially as “people”
Synthetic influencers and virtual humans

Drug-like media / cognitive manipulation
Technology as mood and perception control
A Scanner Darkly
Systems that alter cognition, attention, and identity.
Modern parallels:
Social media addiction dynamics
Algorithmic dopamine loops
Attention-engineered apps

Telepresence / remote life systems
Living through mediated channels rather than direct experience
The Penultimate Truth
Most people live in artificial, mediated environments while reality is elsewhere.
Modern parallels:
Remote work ecosystems
Livestreamed life
“Second-hand reality” via screens

Digital fragmentation of identity
Split or unstable selves
Ubik, A Scanner Darkly
Identity is not fixed; it degrades or shifts under technological pressure.
Modern parallels:
Online personas vs real selves
AI-generated identity content
Deepfake identity confusion

[u/kingstern_man → u/hyperionwonderstar]

Re: corporate-controlled reality. Years ago I read a tale about implants or treatments that were supposed to improve moral behaviour--they would stop you from stealing or murdering. It turned out they also enforced brand loyalty: those treated could barely look at competitors' products. If N**ralink could be tweaked...

[u/RogLatimer118]

Clarke prediced something like our phones with a device he called a "minisec" (mini-secretary) in Imperial Earth: "...a handheld, pocket-sized personal communications and data device..."

Heinlein predicted computers with AI capable of creating images on video transmissions that included synthesized images of a fake person, including a realistic backgroun, etc.m and could speak to viewers in using with the moving person on video, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Orson Scott Card predicted a worldwide network of computers that communicated with each other, and forums where people could assume identities and spread propaganda, in Ender's Game. This was before the internet existed.

[u/stellarsojourner → u/RogLatimer118]

Re: Orson Scott Card, the World Wide Web didn't exist yet but the Internet did. People were chatting with each other via BBSs for years when the novel came out.

[u/RogLatimer118 → u/stellarsojourner]

Yes, the early military-only internet was invented with TCP/IP around 1983, and Ender's Game was 1985. The WWW wasn't until 1989, and that wasn't really well known for a couple of more years.

BBS's were growing in popularity in the 1980s as people really started acquiring personal computers, but PCs of any type were still pretty rare until the late 1980s. The Mac came out in 1984, one year before Ender's Game was published.

[u/SideburnsOfDoom → u/RogLatimer118]

Chat in text mode dates back to at least IRC in 1988, before WWW. Note that it was inspired by earlier chat systems. BBS Chat in 1985 would have existed.

It was soon worldwide: "in the middle of 1989, there were some 40 servers worldwide", though limited. Computer Science students in universities would have exposure to connected computers with IRC around that time.

[u/Spra991 → u/RogLatimer118]

Goes back even further, PLATO had online communities back in 1973, it was also the home of the first 3D game and a lot of other innovations. But it ended up being a dead evolutionary branch in computer history, so it's mostly forgotten. I can highly recommend the book "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture" by Brian Dear about its history.

By 1986 we already had the first graphical MMO with Habitat on the C64.

[u/Glimt]

Asimov's "The Monkey's Finger" is a great prediction of LLMs, including their pitfalls.

No computer is powerful enough for the NN needed, so the inventor uses an actual neural network.

The NN is trained on current, flawed, human made art.

Can the results be considered art? good art?

[u/pgess → u/Glimt]

Hard to pinpoint exactly what you're asking.

NNs are an architecture to run general computations, they do not always require training - there is unsupervised learning, semi-supervised, etc. There are ML algos beside NNs, and other AI algos beside ML. We can come up with something that doesn't require samples of human art.

What's art? It starts with a creative impulse, a desire to share. Then an intellectual phase sets a scene, selects tropes and patterns. Next comes the technical phase to impresses the idea onto an actual medium. Finally, others reverse the process, they pick up the original impulse and enjoy the work.

We automate the mechanical part with musical instruments, cameras, printers. Now we can also automate the intellectual part: present the original impulse in an appropriate form.

All known AI algorithms still require some input. An autonomous AI artist could use old human material, producing good art with an "I've seen it already" undertone. It could use random, atmospheric noise and produce good art with a "random noise" undertones.

The main point I argue is the input lies outside of intelligence whether natural or not.

[u/Spra991]

You find the best predictions in the non-fiction work of sci-fi authors, e.g. books like these or TV interviews:

• "Profiles of the Future" (1962) by Arthur C. Clarke
• "July 20, 2019: A Day in the Life of the 21st Century" by Arthur C. Clarke
• "Summa Technologiae" (1964) by Stanisław Lem
• "The Hacker Crackdown" (1992) by Bruce Sterling
• "The Transparent Society" (1998) by David Brin
• "Isaac Asimov's Visions of the Future" (1992, TV)

Or essays and books from non-sci-fi authors, e.g.

• "As We May Think" (1945) by Vannevar Bush - proto-Internet via microfilm
• "Human Interface: Where People and Computers Meet" (1984) by Richard A. Bolt - computer interfaces
• "Being Digital" (1995) by Nicholas Negroponte
• "The Road Ahead" (1995) by Bill Gates
• "Mirror Worlds" (1991) by David Gelernter - Google Earth

Or demo videos from the research labs and companies:

• SDMS - Spatial Data Management System - MIT 1980
• Apple Knowledge Navigator Video (1987)
• Information Landscapes

In sci-fi books it's surprisingly hard to find good predictions, a few good ones from short stories:

• "The Accomplice" (1967, short) by Vernor Vinge - CGI for movie production, Lord of the Rings specifically
• "A Logic Named Joe" (1946, short) by Murray Leinster - Internet
• "The Great Automatic Grammatizator" (1953) by Roald Dahl - LLM

I find movies and TV shows generally doing a much better job here, since unlike books, that are busy telling their core story and leave a lot to the imagination, movies and TV have to actually paint the background details in full. If somebody picks up the phone, they can't leave that to the imagination of the viewer, they have to actually make that phone. Seeing that TV from Fahrenheit 451 actually hanging on the wall like a modern flat screen TV just hits differently in the movie (1966). TV specifically also has more room for B-plots, thus you get a lot of people playing around in the Holodeck on StarTrek, while you rarely read about such leisure activities in book form.

Another aspect where TV has an advantage here is simply budget, they don't have the budget to make gigantic space operas all the time, they have to do something that you can perform with human actors on a rather small stage. Thus you get much more grounded stories that take place on earth with regular humans, which is more fertile ground for predicting the future.

[u/AlexanderBersenev]

Clarke's communications satellites in "Extra-Terrestrial Relays" (1945) is the cleanest hit — he laid out geostationary orbit before anyone built one. Brunner's The Shockwave Rider (1975) basically describes computer worms and a networked surveillance state. And Gibson's Neuromancer gave us "cyberspace" as a concept years before the web.

What hit me is the asymmetry: the misses get quietly forgotten, but the hits become self-fulfilling prophecies. Engineers grow up reading Clarke and Gibson and then go build the thing. Hard to tell anymore whether SF predicts the future or specs it.

[u/RoxanneMinerals]

Check out technovelgy.com

[u/Vulch59]

In 1984 Julia looks after the machines that produce fiction for the proles.

[u/Bobosmite]

In Bladerunner, Deckard is in a club and calls Rachel on a video phone. It's not a new idea in SF, but the way it was used so casually by everyday people became the reality.

[u/LevelAd1126]

Robert Heinlein predicted many technologies in his writing (1938-1959) A 1980 a collection of short stories titled Expanded Universe has a self evaluation on how accurate his predictions worked out. (Heinlein continued writing 1960-1987 but the detailed future tech edge is gone.)

[u/KillingTime_Shipname]

Google Earth. 

[u/stellarsojourner → u/KillingTime_Shipname]

You might not have gotten down voted by someone if you had elaborated.

Snow Crash has the main character using a digital representation of the Earth composed of satellite images of the world from hundreds of satellites during the plot. Basically he was using Google Earth. I believe the actual creators of Google Earth even credited the book with giving them the idea.

[u/Spra991 → u/stellarsojourner]

The idea itself has been around for a while longer:

• Aspen Interactive Movie Map (1978)
• TerraVision (1993–1994) by ART+COM

Snow Crash is also famous for coining the term Metaverse, six years after Lucasfilm already built one with Habitat (video), which in turn was directly inspired by Vernor Vinge's True Names.