Which brings us round to sci-fi, a genre that should really come into its own when it comes ot imagining where technology might take us. Indeed, it has the somewhat infamous reputation of having a bit of wild and harebrained ideas that most wrote off as near-impossible. Yet a funny thing happened on the way to “impossible”—a lot of those things are no longer impossible anymore, because technology keeps marching. Well, sci-fi is not all laser swords and intergalactic space battles. Its a think tank for ideas which somehow find their way to actual technology, many of them even decades after.
And even when the writers actually predicted some of us to become true, it’s like a validation party for people who lightly fantasized about that.
Consider the communicator from Star Trek for instance. In the 60s, those slender flip-open gadgets felt like you owned a piece of science-fiction cool. Today, they would hardly raise an eyebrow…why? We have been flipping opening our own mini communicators since the early 2000s (yep, we’re looking at you Motorola Razr). Now, we are in the glass slab era that makes Captain Kirk’s gadget look like it was hewn from rock. But this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of predictive storytelling. Gene Roddenberry and company simply dreamed up these communicators, but in doing so tapped into a wish — for instantaneous communication that could go anywhere without losing quality or even dropping off mid-sentence — which became flesh too real quicker than anyone actually thought.
It is a sign of how speculative fictions so often present its tech dreams.
Blade Runner, also a heavyweight in the almost-right-about-the-future stakes gave us 2009 as seen through its gritty neon-tinged lens. It didnt get the flying cars, but it surely landed squarely an existential AI frenemy perceived collapse. Replicants — genetically altered beings might seem like an invention of the far off future, but their actualization can not be more behind than a reflection in how much we have succeeded till this day to come term with AI and genetic editing. And consider the ethical dilemmas we are wrestling with around AI these days: Are they capable of human-level thinking, feeling or even rights?
No, we have yet to crack consciousness in machines either (!) but there is always the powerful reminder found within Blade Runner: The exploration of what it means to be human and that ever blurring line between organic life…and synthetic bio-forms.
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 among us and guide our lives and missions for disbetter or worse — alas! Alexa and Siri may not conspire against us just yet, 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 smart assistant that surrounds us nowadays prefer to remind use about tasks rather than blowing up space missions.
If you think those classic examples were just one-in-a-million guesses, buckle up… these modern stories may be nearly as good at predicting the future. Black Mirror has almost become the digital-age equivalent of a Nostradamus. Social credit systems (is anyone thinking Nosedive?) Charlie Brooker’s anthology series is like the crystal ball of our tech obsessed future — from eye implants (The Entire History Of You) to brain-machine interfaces (Black Museum). That was more of a cautionary tale than playing the role in taking it off table remember the drama from Hated in Nation involving drone bees? Today, as bees are dying off and mechanical robo-bees take flight to pollinate fields; it seems we might be currently living in the beta test of that plot.
Black Mirror is so disturbingly on point because it pushes contemporary tech to its logical, albeit dystopian end. Think Nosedive, where social interactions give ratings that determine your status and opportunities. The former is an image that sounds right out of a dystopian near future which in practice — acting somewhat like China’s real-life social credit system but turned up to eleven times more asinine — could be criticized on its own. 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 todays technology. A petri dish of our technological fears, an example of what might come to pass if we are not careful.
And The Expanse, which is the high-water mark for how realistic hard science fiction can be. It has a gritty realism to space travel (there’s no warp drive stealing our speed of thought or any other unfair faster-than-light shenanigans. The show is portraying what those challenges might be faced with, from the physical damage to human body by gravity and political division over resources (a bit more on that later) in a near evolution of reality. As space agencies and private enterprises like NASA, SpaceX seek to expand their horizons in humanity’s journey out into the stars; it takes little imaginative leap past The Expanse for all of these events to transform from science fiction dramatizations somewhere off on a distant horizon into something much more resembling an outline where interplanetary Homo sapiens face brand new challenges.
Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984): We should also mention Neuromancer, a 1984 novel by way of the cyberwarren Badlands that pretty much gave birth to the idea of “cyberspace.” Gibson’s idea of an entirely virtual world, with hackers jacking in to information networks had been novel at the time however it now seems almost mundane. Our brainstubs may not yet “jack in” with our brains, but the way we now use the internet — gaming in pseudo-virtual worlds or carrying out parts of a real-world life online—drives along similar lines to Gibson’s vision. Most emerging conversations today about the metaverse, augmented reality & digital identity would not exist without this groundwork played by books like Neuromancer.
Even better — theoretically speaking, speculative fiction is so much more than an exercise of making extrapolations that might prove eventually right. It is about the future we hope for and fear, it provides a way to think critically in what direction are you walking towards. When Philip K. Dick sat down to write Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The way PKD saw it in Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, Blade Runner’s source material, making up artificial things wasn’t a fun game. The questions he was asking were about what makes us human, and that is a topic which in our increasingly AI-robotic society are of more relevance than ever.
Just consider how AI is raising new issues about machine consciousness and ethical limits even today. There are AI creations from the likes of OpenAI with their GPT or Google and its DeepMind that approach Hal9000 than we would care to think. It is not that they will some day go all 2001: A Space Odyssey and start collaborating to take out our oxygen supply, but their abilities in natural language processing and automating decisions make it hard to clearly classify them as a tool or companion. Blueprints seem hardly a stretch from what other many sci-fi series will have us believe, the more AI infiltrates our lives.
And then, oh what the hell — how about The Matrix’s red-pill,- blue-pill metaphor as a phrase that has outlived both this film and its own creation to become something used in daily discourse over 20 years later. It used to be a symbol for ignorance versus harsh reality, now it’s shorthand for questioning putting the nature of shared existence. This is a time where virtual reality, augmented reality and even AI created content have entered our daily lives forcing us to question if this already the Matrix being discussed in classrooms or forums. Meta is pumping $10 billion into the metaverse, very soon we will be able to shapeshift our reality just like we can our internet connection.
The sort of reality that the Matrix and its ilk basically foresaw, accidentally taking a cyberpunk dream and making it into an IRL nightmare for the Web 2.0 age.
However, one of the clearest precursors to what we now call speculative fiction folding back on itself is biopunk — films like Gattaca. Set in a dystopian enclave where genetic manipulation had spiraled out of control, this 1997 film juxtaposed the privileged genetically engineered “valids” against their naturally conceived counterparts–the “in-valids.” Jump to the present day and CRISPR – yes, that CRISPR — has made genetic editing more accessible than ever. Not quite Gattaca worthy science : designer babies and other (non)choicesGadgetsInFo From the realm of sci-fi thought experiments to conference rooms in academia and policy think tanks.
What about speculative fiction makes it matter, that its domains of possibilities remain so alive? Here, we can play with dimensions of the future, see what alternatives there might be to present day dilemmas — imitations performed at velocities much faster than real-time. We use it to dream of those utopias, such as the post-scarcity world dreamed about in Star Trek; and we also use it to warn us from dystopian societies like George Orwell’s 1984. True, Orwell’s bleak vision of an all-powerful state was far from a prophecy but somewhat less so in terms of today’s lack of privacy and government spying.
It is a reminder that the greatest speculative fiction doesn’t just observe what might be in order to get certain facts correct, but captures an era’s tech spirit and explores its progress-related what-ifs.
The next time you crack open a sci-fi novel or binge-watch speculative TV, remember: You aren’t just escaping for its own sake. You are interacting with a genre that moves boundaries, makes us dream more vividly than ever before and sometimes—just occasionally—turns fiction into reality. The future is an uncertain thing, but if there’s one takeaway from speculative fiction — just maybe the wildest dreams of today will be on tomorrow’s tech headlines.
