On Nov 1, 1909, EM Forster's amazingly prescient scifi story "The Machine Stops" was published
On this day in tech history, EM Forster's short story "The Machine Stops," a look at the collapse of a future society reliant on technology, was published in The Oxford and Cambridge Review.
The story follows a mother and son who live on opposite sides of a world where humans live in underground cells because they can no longer live on the surface of the Earth. The cells have buttons and switches to request everything one might need and communicate through systems similar to modern instant messaging and videoconferencing.
The global Machine is a system everyone uses to access electronic information from their cell, reminiscent of the Internet. The only actual books are instruction manuals to operate the cells, and all forests have been destroyed.
In a time where radio was just coming around, Forster predicted technologies still decades, if not a whole century, away.
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http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/other/4423662/The-Machine-Stops-is-published--November-1--1909
It's not a terribly good story, but Forster was mind blowingly prescient- and not just in this story.
