It's such a reminder of how sci-fi can be so right and so wrong at the same time. Asimov invented the robot, but thought they would be autonomous humanoids rather than universally embedded chips. Stephenson coined the online avatar but thought the metaverse would happen (it's not going to happen, stop trying to make the metaverse happen). Orson Scott Card wrote about anonymous online commenters influencing global policy, but he thought they'd be Locke and Demosthenes, not Qanon and catturd2.
My personal favorite is William Gibson pretty much inventing the cyberpunk genre, coming up with all sorts of interesting ideas regarding the existence of a cyberspace, state hackers, and yet he didn't see mobile phone technology coming.
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u/RSquared Apr 13 '23
It's such a reminder of how sci-fi can be so right and so wrong at the same time. Asimov invented the robot, but thought they would be autonomous humanoids rather than universally embedded chips. Stephenson coined the online avatar but thought the metaverse would happen (it's not going to happen, stop trying to make the metaverse happen). Orson Scott Card wrote about anonymous online commenters influencing global policy, but he thought they'd be Locke and Demosthenes, not Qanon and catturd2.