As a science fiction aficionado, I’ve always been intrigued by speculating about the future. No one has ever got it completely right, but some writers have given us glimpses of what is possible. That future might be bleak or awesome, filled with technological wonders or a desolate, post-apocalyptic disaster. For me, that’s what makes science fiction so fun to read. Depending on your tastes, you can look forward to the coming years with anticipation, or dread the spinning hands of the clock as they mark the passage of the moments we know toward some dimly perceived Armageddon.
The reality of those predictions is that they’re never quite right. Some aspects of both the positive and negative appear when the present inevitably collides with the future, and we walk the middle ground, never progressing as fast or far as the futurists would like, and never falling into some form of ultimate societal dysfunction.
Despite the poor track record, it is fun to speculate. And those who get it the most right are not really the ones doing the predicting; they’re the ones doing the making. We progress as a society, changing the world around us, not because we’re good at figuring out what might happen years in the future, but because a gifted few grasp the present and bend it to their will, reshaping the immediate future into something the rest of us wish we had imagined.
Just a precious few years ago, who would have thought you could fit a thousand songs on a trinket that fits into your pocket? Or that you could carry a computing device capable of billions of calculations a second under your arm? Or that you no longer need an answering machine to catch all those calls you missed while out of your house? Or that automobiles would come with 100,000 mile warranties? Or that you could fly across the country for 150 dollars?
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On the other hand, we don’t have any kind of permanent base on the moon. Nor have we sent people to Mars or any other body in the solar system. And although medical technology continues to move forward, we can’t replace our eyes or grow a new organ from scratch.
Much of the reason for reality falling behind the pace of prediction is that most science fiction never included any kind of economic future as part of the plot, nor even as a backdrop against which the story was set. It’s economics that eventually wins out over physics, no matter what is ultimately possible. I have encountered this in my own career, as the ever-shrinking geometries of computer chips has allowed us to pack amazing power into a tiny sliver of silicon smaller than your fingernail. That progression is called Moore’s Law, after Gordon Moore of Intel published a paper in the 60’s on the phenomenon (he is one of the truly gifted visionaries, even though his prediction was more a self-fulfilling prophesy than an outright glimpse of the future). Semiconductor technology continues to progress even still, but we are coming quickly to the end of that scaling, not because we can’t figure out how to make transistors smaller, but because it will cost tens of billions of dollars to build a manufacturing line to create them; there simply aren’t enough markets in the world to support that kind of capital outlay.
And so we lumber into the future, making small modifications tomorrow in many areas that will add up to significant cultural changes next year, or the next decade. For my part, I enjoy finding books that speak to next year’s marvels, or that probe the depths of far-flung adventures set among the stars. Both types transport me to places and times that beckon, and given the inevitability of reaching the future, it’s exciting to guess where it will take us.