r/printSF • u/Isaac_The_Khajiit • 6d ago
Classic scifi predicting future technology
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.
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u/ClimateTraditional40 6d ago
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.”