The DU Lounge
Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsIt's the year 2019. Do you realize HOW FUTURISTIC we already are?
The scifi-trilogy "Neuromancer" was written in the 1980s, way before anyone had any idea about building the internet. The trilogy contains the internet, and is actually quite accurate in its description with online-forums and chat-rooms.
Neuromancer also has an all-powerfull internet-corporation, run by the Tessier-Ashpool family, that got ridiculously rich by exploiting their online-monopoly.
Connecting your brain to a computer? We already got that: We have brain-machine-interfaces (BMI) that are accurate enough to give simple commands like up, down, left, right, execute by simply THINKING these commands.
Artificial limbs? We have artificial legs and arms and the newest ones even have a rudimentary sense of touch. (A swiss medical company offered bionic eyes a few years ago, but it seems like the company went belly-up.)
Cloning? We have bioprinting. That is a 3D-printer making organs from scratch from cloned cells. It already works on skin. So, if you are wounded and need a skin-graft, we got you covered.
Exoskelettons? Numerous countries and corporations are developing strength-enhancing exoskelettons. The south-korean company Cyberdyne Inc. is building strength-enhacing exoskelettons for use in shipyards, while the US DoD is developing exoskelettons for battlefield use.
Robots? Robots are so good at doing human tasks, they have become a real economic threat to the workforce. Meanwhile AI has become so smart, researchers had to come up with trickier tests to challenge them.
Lasers? The US has weapons-grade lasers on their most modern warships and China is currently developing their own lasers.
Rail-guns? The US is currently developing them and plans to use them to as artillery on warships.
Those water-collectors the Skywalker-farm has in Star Wars? We have experimental water-collectors based on layered nanomaterials that are far more effective than conventional methods like condensation and need way less energy. While still way too expensive for mass-production, there is for example one such water-collector that is as big as a backpack, works on solar-power and collects enough water from almost-dry air to meet the supply of a single human.
Genetic editing? We have the CRISPR-method that allows genetic editing at will. One idea is to create new kinds of plants, by replacing the photosynthesis of plants with the photosynthesis of cyanobacteria. Those new plants would grow much, much faster than naturally-occuring plants and could feed an increasing world-population. (Of course, nobody knows yet what the consequences for our biosphere would be if such a super-fast growing plant were to escape into the wild.)
All-powerfull corporations like OCP and Weyland-Yutani are meddling in politics? Well...
Tiggeroshii
(11,088 posts)But it wasn't closed to the level that the book describes, I would assume. Chat rooms existed in 1980 with Compuserv's and text based chats with PLATO in 1973 (not sure the platform though). I think forums corresponded with the same development. But what wasn't clear at the time was how prevelant in the future these platforms would be.
hunter
(38,303 posts)It's an old system, from the early 'sixties, but the "classic" PLATO is version IV with the custom made 512 X 512 bit plasma displays, which were introduced in 1972.
I had a PLATO account in the later 'eighties, but it was getting to be old-fashioned then. Officially PLATO was shut down in 2006. Quite a bit of it has survived just as it was, maintained by hobbyists.
When I first logged onto the internet it looked like this:
wikipedia
I later had accounts with Delphi and GEnie as well.
It's funny what science fiction did and didn't predict.
mahatmakanejeeves
(57,299 posts)LunaSea
(2,892 posts)Dagstead Bumwood
(3,595 posts)Sorry, Walter, our corporate overlords are moving us in the opposite direction.
Ron Obvious
(6,261 posts)That staple of old Science Fiction. Thank goodness, really. Imagine what the skies would look like. Only I should be able to own one, otherwise it'd be miserable world.
unc70
(6,109 posts)Several commercial versions of flying car are just now coming to market. Deliveries by early next year. The tricky thing is getting them certified for highway use, what with crash tests, etc. May not have to wait too much longer.
Ron Obvious
(6,261 posts)But they're nothing like the models in e.g. The Jetsons, Back to the Future, or Blade Runner, and the logistical problems of switching from driving to flying and air traffic control will probably mean we won't see the skies dominated by them any time soon.
As with time travel machines, only I should be able to have one or the world will turn to hell rather quickly.