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Ask HN: Favorite technology predictions in science fiction?

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Re: Ask HN: Favorite technology predictions in science fiction?

#51

Post by skookumchuck »

tabtab wrote: post #50
skookumchuck wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inventing is building a working device.

Not necessarily. Da Vinci had the basic concepts right, but many practical details were missing. "Half inventor"?

Yes, necessarily. The "many practical details" are usually the key to it working. For example, the details are why the Wright bros. airplane flew, and the others didn't. The same with the light bulb, the telephone, the Xerox machine, rocket engines, etc.

Maybe the Patent Office accepts concepts, but that leads to nothing but trouble. The real work to inventing is getting something to actually work. Anybody can have an idea, ideas are a dime a dozen.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite technology predictions in science fiction?

#53

Post by yesenadam »

femto113 wrote: post #16

The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson, 1995) had many eerily prescient visions but I've always liked some of the more subtle ones: the "Neo-Victorians" who put extra value on handmade goods in a world where anything can be printed foreshadowed Etsy and the modern "artisanal" everything, the use of pictogram based language foreshadowed rising use of emojis, the Primer as a source of education accessible to anyone foreshado…

>the "Neo-Victorians" who put extra value on handmade goods in a world where anything can be printed

From Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (1899):

...the cheap, and therefore indecorous, articles of daily consumption in modern industrial communities are commonly machine products; and the generic feature of the physiognomy of machine-made goods as compared with the hand-wrought article is their greater perfection in workmanship and greater accuracy in the detail execution of the design. Hence it comes about that the visible imperfections of the hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both. Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin and William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this ground their propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up and carried forward since their time. And hence also the propaganda for a return to handicraft and household industry. So much of the work and speculations of this group of men as fairly comes under the characterisation here given would have been impossible at a time when the visibly more perfect goods were not the cheaper. - p162

Re: Ask HN: Favorite technology predictions in science fiction?

#54

Post by tabtab »

skookumchuck wrote: post #51
tabtab wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. Da Vinci had the basic concepts right, but many practical details were missing. "Half inventor"?

Yes, necessarily. The "many practical details" are usually the key to it working. For example, the details are why the Wright bros. airplane flew, and the others didn't. The same with the light bulb, the telephone, the Xerox machine, rocket engines, etc. Maybe the Patent Office accepts concepts, but that leads to nothing but trouble. The real work to inventing is getting something to actually work. Anybody can have a…

Re: Maybe the Patent Office accepts concepts, but that leads to nothing but trouble.

Perhaps, but definitions don't have to be practical nor rational. Vocabulary is typically driven by common usage (language), not by logic. I'm just the messenger.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite technology predictions in science fiction?

#55

Post by skookumchuck »

tabtab wrote: post #54
skookumchuck wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, necessarily. The "many practical details" are usually the key to it working. For example, the details are why the Wright bros. airplane flew, and the others didn't. The same with the light bulb, the telephone, the Xerox machine, rocket engines, etc. Maybe the Patent Office accepts concepts, but that leads to nothing but trouble. The real work to inventing is getting something to actually work. Anybody can have a…

Re: Maybe the Patent Office accepts concepts, but that leads to nothing but trouble. Perhaps, but definitions don't have to be practical nor rational. Vocabulary is typically driven by common usage (language), not by logic. I'm just the messenger.

If you want a dictionary definition, that's easy enough to find online.

Re: Ask HN: Favorite technology predictions in science fiction?

#57

Post by pasbesoin »

nurettin wrote: post #28
pasbesoin wrote: post #20

Clarke's "The City and the Stars" Technologically enabled immortality (in an interesting manner). Massive, crystalline data storage. Immersive gaming, including the negative, subsuming aspects of same. The individual as radical. The radical as an essential component of long-term planning and viability.

It seems the sci-fi trend for huge data storage back then was "crystals!". So were many of remote viewing devices, alien navigation systems and space fuel.

A comment on another thread, made about a day after my GP comment, mentioned an influential paper published in, IIRC, 1944 speculating on crystalline storage of complete human genetic information. (I'm assuming this would encompass a pre-double-helix understanding/conception of said data.)

That would tie into Clarke's story well (originally in several forms, that got consolidated into "The City and the Stars" with a 1952 copyright. And he would have been in a position (scientifically active) to have encountered it.

I don't know that any such thing happened. But, it was an interesting coincidence to run across that comment. (Sorry, I don't have it to hand.)

Re: Ask HN: Favorite technology predictions in science fiction?

#58

Post by unknownkadath »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #7

Larry Niven predicted organ harvesting from political dissidents, as well as black-market organ transplantation more generally. (See his Gil the ARM stories, as well as another short story whose name I can't recall :/)

He did miss out on tissue culturing and organ printing, though!

Re: Ask HN: Favorite technology predictions in science fiction?

#59

Post by tabtab »

skookumchuck wrote: post #55
tabtab wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: Maybe the Patent Office accepts concepts, but that leads to nothing but trouble. Perhaps, but definitions don't have to be practical nor rational. Vocabulary is typically driven by common usage (language), not by logic. I'm just the messenger.

If you want a dictionary definition, that's easy enough to find online.

I'm not sure what your point is then, to be honest. Yes, final products often take a lot of experiments and tuning. But I'm not sure all of that is "inventing" any more than testing software and fixing bugs is "inventing". When is tuning inventing and when is it not?

Re: Ask HN: Favorite technology predictions in science fiction?

#60

Post by muzani »

ip26 wrote: post #33
MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #24

Asimov in "The Caves of Steel"; Earth has a huge population that lives in huge cities, therefore it needs powerful computers as it has to track/police its massive population. Asimov guessed in 1953 that computers are a surveillance tool! "R. Daneel came to his desk with a sheaf of papers. "And those are?" asked Baley. "A list of men and women who might belong to a Medievalist organization." "How many does the list in…

The comment about "three hours" was of course supposed to impress you with the sheer speed of it- but I can't help thinking it would take only minutes today!

Or real time. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
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