The concept of predicting the future has changed over time. If we were to go back to Ancient Greece, say, and ask the Oracle at Delphi about the future, the answer, wreathed in riddles, would be about a specific event. Croesus (the “rich as” guy) famously asked if he should make war on the Persians, misinterpreted the extremely ambiguous answer, and suffered the consequences.
Similarly, moving forward to the late Middle Ages, Nostradamus is credited with predicting the death of Henri II of France in a jousting tournament, although, yet again, the language is, er, Delphic. Both, though, are prophecies tied to specific events.
It is not until much, much later, after the industrial revolution, when the world itself seemed to be changing at an ever-increasing rate, that people started to ask with increasing urgency, Where are we going? What is going to happen to our society, our customs? And, perhaps most pressingly: What are we to make of our machines?
Outside of the fortuneteller’s tent, individual events seemed suddenly less important. Certainly, our modern times have no equivalent to Delphi or Nostradamus. What we do have, though, is science fiction.
Science Fiction and the Modern World
Scientifiction, as it was then called, may well have arisen, at least in part, to answer these broader questions. Jules Verne sent men to the Moon; H.G. Wells imagined the skies of his future filled with combat aircraft. SF, since its inception, has concerned itself with possible futures and alternative versions of the present. Not, it must be said, because these things will come to pass, but because they might, and the might of it says something interesting about the times in which author and reader actually live.
SF writers are not prophets and don’t pretend to be, but even when we’re wrong, it’s often in interesting ways. In Make Room! Make Room!, Harry Harrison’s 1966 novel about the crushing evils of overpopulation, the United States is reduced to penury by sheer weight of numbers: food is rationed, running water for showers is a perk of the One Percent, and power for air-conditioning is almost non-existent.
The novel ends with New York ringing in the New Year, flipping the calendar from 1999 to 2000. And the crippling press of people foreseen by the author? Three hundred and forty-four million. The population of the US today? Three hundred and forty-five million. No food rationing, plenty of running water, and possibly more aircon than is good for us. As prophecies go, no one is going to accuse Harrison of being the Twentieth Century’s answer to Nostradamus.
And yet. The number of humans on Planet Earth remains a fraught topic. The billionaire Jeff Bezos, he of Amazon and Washington Post fame, has happily advocated for a future in which the solar system contains no fewer than one trillion humans, whereas the British naturalist, Sir David Attenborough, the driving force behind wildlife shows like Blue Planet and Asia, has described the present human population as a “plague,” responsible for everything from a loss of biodiversity to global warming.
Six decades after it was written, you can read Harrison’s novel and take comfort from the fact that it was spectacularly wrong — or come to the grimmer conclusion that the only thing he erred in was the timing. Either way, it’s not a book that has lost its relevance. The thing about SF is not so much whether the predictions are right or wrong: it’s the fact that they are made in the first place.
Technology of the Future Is Already Here
My own speculative fiction is full of all sorts of prognostications, some completely fanciful, others less so. Let me share one of the “less so” ones, then check back with me in 15 years and see how I did.
In Esperance, my latest novel, two of the main characters carry all sorts of artificial implants. Sensors that allow them to access the internet, enhanced vision, strength boosters and so on. The reader might well view these characters as cyborgs, although the characters see themselves as entirely normal.
I included this technology in the book because I’m absolutely convinced that some version of it is going to happen. It’s already happening. Right now, we’re making more responsive arms and legs for the limbless, cochlear implants to help with hearing, mechanisms to bridge broken spinal nerves and brain implants to help people who are locked in communicate and move by accessing a computer cursor.
I could go on and on about how we’re using software and hardware to make the lives of those with disabilities a little better. But having started down a particular road, it’s not generally in human nature to stop. Implants will inevitably improve to the point where fully abled people will suddenly become the market: bloodstream nanobots to break down fatty deposits, the ability to read a signpost at a thousand yards or outsprint a present-day Olympic athlete and, most importantly of all, brains with built-in computer access.
All of these things exist in some form already. They’re only going to get slicker and more ubiquitous. I genuinely think that the last generation of unaugmented humans may already have been born. Our own children and grandchildren will have their cerebral cortexes retrofitted with AI just to keep one step ahead of the robots. Depending on your personality, that’s either a brave new frontier or an unspeakable nightmare. Either way, though, it leaves us with a single, unarguable truth.
Trivia night will never be the same.
