By that measure we have a massive backlog of decades old laws. tl;dr: Guessing how a new tech can be used: sometimes you can get it right. Trying to extrapolate out something that currently looks exponential: much rarer that you get it right. Plus, no one is going to give you a flying car, too much potential energy.
“tl;dr: Guessing how a new tech can be used: sometimes you can get it right. Trying to extrapolate out something that currently looks exponential: much rarer that you get it right. Plus, no one is going to give you a flying car, too much potential energy.”
I take a more backwards-looking tack here: we are naturally pattern matchers, and we match fuzzy patterns we recall and ignore the rest. I’m not convinced of the common argument, say, that Star Trek TOS communicators led to cell phone development, merely that it matches most closely with that experience. Even then, from an actual technology perspective, they are really only superficially the same. “I want to communicate easily over large distances” is very different from “I have the ability to communicate with zero infrastructure both ad-hoc among devices and with space ships in orbit though a voice interface with seemingly inexhaustible energy reserves.”
Also, how much of this predictive power is about the user experience versus actually creating the technology in question? In my experience, if you’re sufficiently vague as a writer (in a good way), you meet the goal of communicating the product experience without being wrong about the engineering. But you can’t have technology without the engineering. Maybe we should be hiring more sci-fi authors as Product Managers.
I feel like there's a bit of sci-fi aficionados (rather than authors) as product managers going on in some of these cases. I think Smith was actually counting TOS as an abject failure of prediction, and said that the biggest successes were cyberpunk and early industrial stuff (Verne).
The fact is though, as you said, it's all survivorship bias.
“tl;dr: Guessing how a new tech can be used: sometimes you can get it right. Trying to extrapolate out something that currently looks exponential: much rarer that you get it right. Plus, no one is going to give you a flying car, too much potential energy.”
I take a more backwards-looking tack here: we are naturally pattern matchers, and we match fuzzy patterns we recall and ignore the rest. I’m not convinced of the common argument, say, that Star Trek TOS communicators led to cell phone development, merely that it matches most closely with that experience. Even then, from an actual technology perspective, they are really only superficially the same. “I want to communicate easily over large distances” is very different from “I have the ability to communicate with zero infrastructure both ad-hoc among devices and with space ships in orbit though a voice interface with seemingly inexhaustible energy reserves.”
Also, how much of this predictive power is about the user experience versus actually creating the technology in question? In my experience, if you’re sufficiently vague as a writer (in a good way), you meet the goal of communicating the product experience without being wrong about the engineering. But you can’t have technology without the engineering. Maybe we should be hiring more sci-fi authors as Product Managers.
I feel like there's a bit of sci-fi aficionados (rather than authors) as product managers going on in some of these cases. I think Smith was actually counting TOS as an abject failure of prediction, and said that the biggest successes were cyberpunk and early industrial stuff (Verne).
The fact is though, as you said, it's all survivorship bias.
“"Everybody lies" says one of the top 3 Sherlock Holmes based characters.”
I’ll just leave this here… https://twitter.com/remember_sarah/status/1321687035745193984?s=21