Let us now turn our attention to sci-fi, a genre that basks in the wildest dreams and fantasies of mankind. Where technology is concerned, sci-fi has garnered a reputation for its preposterous attempts at forecasting the future. From laser swords to pulsing spaceship dogfights, people do not question the frivolity of it all. Actually, there is some truth behind its imagination that helps fuel actual technology. decade later and many of these imaginings transform into reality.
With all that said, there are some outlandish ideas that actually turn out to no longer be impossible. For the fantasy skeptics out there, this is quite the mystifying turn of events, or everything is suddenly possible mega boost party.
Take the communicator from Star Trek as an example. Those slender flip-open gadgets felt like a piece of science fiction magic in the 60s and would be far from raising eyebrows today. Why? The world has been turning our mini-communcators, such as the Motorola Razr, turned us into mini communicators since the early 2000s. Now, we are in the glass slab era which makes Kirk’s gadget look as if it was hewn from rock. Predictive storytelling goes much more deeper than this. Roddenberry simply dreamed up those, but, in doing so envisioned a wish that there can be communication everywhere, anytime and dropping mid-sentence which became the reality faster than anyone thought.
Such scenarios are astonishing at how speculative fictions so often try to attempt to draw and design its tech dreams.
As for Blade Runner, a true champion in the nearing futuristic genre, gave us neon-lit 2009 visuals. It didn’t include the flying cars, but braced us with the fully A.I. frenemy perceived collapse This is sharper loss in regard to the original promise of technology. Faster than any novel can predict, genetic editing and artificial intelligence hands over remaking the future to us. We do lack ethics which run rampant considering the replicants – genetically altered humans devoid of feeling. Are they sentient, capable of human thought, emotion, and even rights?
There’s always an element of remembering highlighted in Blade Runner’s where we still havn’t cracked consciousness in machines closer to home. The line slitting humanity in halves, humans, and organic-forms devoid of life…and bioweapons pretending to be organic. And sci-fi literature and movies wake us from the dream of flying cars with machine burdens.
Oh, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. While HAL 9000 may have been the image of cold, calculating AI come protagonist-turned-antagonist (alas!), Arthur C._Clarke’s story was not just about a machine gone rogue; it also foretold an era where machines would be amongst us and guide our missions and lives for disbetter or worse – alas! Alexa and Siri may doting from all corners wait not be conspiring against us but our homes feel more sci-fi every day. Clarke’s view of AI assistance has become a thing in our everyday lives even if the appliances now smart that surround us prefer to remind use about tasks instead of running them.
Black Mirror statues of *Nostradamus* in the age of technology… Some may argue the more recent episodes are good at predicting the future too! With plot lines revolving around Social credit systems (I’m looking at you *Nosedive*) or eye implants (*The Entire History Of You*), it feels like Brooker’s anthology series acts as a crystal ball for foreshadowing our tech obsessed future. Do you remember when he warned us about society’s addiction to technology in *Hated in Nation* with the drone bee drama? It feels like we are in the beta testing phase of that plot, where bees are dying off, and robo-bees are taking flight to pollinate fields.
Black Mirror captures our reality in such a disturbingly accurate way because it takes modern technology to its illogical, yet dystopian extreme. Take Nosedive, for instance, where social engagements come with a rating system that dictates your standing and prospects. The former is an image that sounds plucked out of a near future dystopian scifi, which exists — sort of like the Chinese social credit system horror, but ten times more idiotic — can be condemned on its own merit. Sure, that’s alarming but then again it just shows us how speculative fiction is always going to be on hand offering the “yes and…” responses for society. A perfect example is what could transpire if we don’t manage our technological fears.
And Expanse is as far as one can push the boundaries of realism in hard science fiction. It presents space travel with a gritty realism (no warp drive stealing our speed of thought or any other unfair faster-than-light shenanigans). The series explores what such challenges humanity might face, from physical damage to the human body due to gravity, and resource fragmentation and political conflict (I will elaborate on that later) in a reality we call near evolution of reality. While agencies and privatized companies such as NASA and SpaceX venture further into the solar system awaiting the day humanity steps out into the stars, it takes only a little imaginative leap beyond The Expanse to envision all these events morphing from science fiction dramatizations off in the distant horizon to outlines where interplanetary Homo sapiens face brand new daunting hurdles.
William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984): We ought to highlight Neuromancer, a novel by way of the cyberwarren Badlands which came out in ’84 and pretty much birthed the notion of “cyberspace.” Gibson’s concept of a completely digital world wherein ‘hackers’ jacked into information networks was revolutionary at the time, but feels almost mundane today. Although our brainstubs do not yet ‘jack in’ to interfaces with our heads, the manner in which we now utilize the internet — playing games in simulated environments or performing facets of life online — aligns closely with Gibson’s ideas. Most emerging debates today concerning the metaverse, augmented reality, and digital persona would have never existed without the foundational work from texts like Neuromancer.
It is even better, as in the case of speculative fiction, it surpasses an exercise in making projections that may or may not come to pass. It encompasses futuristic desires alongside fears, which also enables critical reflection of the pathway one is moving towards. Consider the example of Philip K. Dick when he took the decision to write Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep. As PKD saw it, creating artificial things in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – the source of Blade Runner – was not a fun game. From what I understand, he was asking what makes us human, and that is a question which in our world is becoming dominated by AI-robots is even more pertinent.
Just take a moment to think how AI, for instance, raises concerns on machine consciousness and moral boundaries today. With OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s DeepMind, we have creations that approach Hal9000 more than we would want to consider. It’s not like one day we’ll be 2001: A Space Odyssey and they’ll start working together to dethrone us, but when it comes to NLP and automated actions, defining them as a companion or a tool becomes challenging. Along no stretch of the imagination is the the ‘print’ remark untrue when considering what many sci-fi series seem to suggest the more AI permeates our existence.
Imagine, for example, how the blue pill, red pill metaphor from The Matrix outlived the film and its creation alike, only to rise as part of public vernacular over two decades later. At some point it represented ignorance and its counterpart the cruel reality, now it is shorthand for putting into question the nature of shared existence. AI, virtual reality, augmented reality and even AI-generated content are part of a reality we live in now, continuously asking whether the Matrix is what is being discussed in classrooms or forums. Meta has poured $10 billion into the metaverse, allowing us to transform our reality in the nearFuture the same way we do our internet connections.
The Matrix along with other projects grimly prophesized the kind of reality we live in now; accidentally transforming an irl cyberpunk dream into a nightmare for the Web 2.0 world.
Nonetheless, one of the most blatant offshoots and precursors to what we currently refer to as speculative fiction folding backward unto itself is biopunk — movies like Gattaca. This film from 1997 placed in a dystopian enclave where genetic engineering had gone out of control, transported “valids,” the privileged genetically engineered inhabitants, against their naturally conceived counterparts – the “in-valids.” Fast forward to today, and CRISPR has done “that” CRISPR and opened up the world of genetic editing to almost everyone. Not quite Gattaca worthy science : designer babies and other (non)choicesGadgetsInFo From an area of sci-fi thought experiments to board rooms of academia as well as policy think tanks.
What makes speculative fiction matter and allows for its domains of possibilities to remain so alive? Here, we are able to ‘play out’ simulations at speeds exceeding our reality’s pace. Sci-fi serves as a medium for dreaming of post-scarcity utopias, such as those portrayed in ‘Star Trek,’ and serves the opposite purpose warning us of Orwellian dystopian societies. Orwell’s grim vision of a totalitarian state was certainly not prophetic, but his outlook on society’s modern-day lack of privacy and constant surveillance proves he was less off than one would like to think.
This is evidence that the most potent works of speculative fiction do not simply try to think of every possible future with “what if” scenarios, grasping onto irrefutable tangible facts; rather imagine a period’s technological zeitgeist and envision its beheld progress in a more optimistic light.
The next time you delve into a sci-fi book or binge-watch a sci-fi series, keep in mind that: It is not just escapism for no reason. You relate with a genre that shifts limits, allows humanity to dream intensely, and sometimes—just sometimes—makes reality out of fiction. As for the future, it is uncertain, but from what we can gather from Speculative fiction, it is not completely impossible that some of the most outrageous dreams of today could form the basis for the technology of tomorrow.
