TI06 Three Predictions from SF That Came True ... And Three That Didn't.

In his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury describes people in the future wearing small devices in their ears delivering an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk. Little seashell things. At time of recording, some 63 years later, it's entirely possible that you're listening to my voice now on just such a device. Did science fiction Predict AirPods? Then again, what about this? William Gibson's 1984 novel Neuromancer has characters connecting to a digital realm called cyberspace, a term that Gibson coined, via a cable to a socket in the back of the neck. A few years later, Iain M. Banks wrote about neural lace, not a plug-in cable like that, but a fine mesh grown invisibly through the brain, wirelessly fusing mind and machine. Fast forward to March 2024. Elon Musk showcases on X the first person to receive an implantable brain-computer interface developed by his company Neuralink. The subject of the implant can move a cursor on a computer screen, allowing him to control music and play games such as chess with his mind alone, and presumably access the digital realm, now routinely referred to as cyberspace. Did science fiction predict Neuralink? What's going on here? Does science fiction really predict the future? Welcome to the Tech Imaginarium. Join us as we explore how science fiction made the modern world. Hi there, my name's John Helmer, and I'm here as ever with my good friend and science fiction expert, Ezri Karlebach.

Hello. Prediction is very hard.

'especially of the future.' Who said that? Theoretical physicist Niels Bohr, one of the principal architects of science's biggest headfuck, quantum theory. And prediction is the rabbit hole we're burrowing down this time, not quantum theory, thank God. Although the question of whether science fiction actually predicts the future or whether it plays some part in actually creating the future it portrays turns out to be quite a headfuck on its own. So to make things a bit easier, We're going to give you what we hacks call a listicle. I'm not including you in that, Esri, you're not a hack. We're going to highlight 3 transcendentally significant things that were prefigured in science fiction and definitely came true, and 3 that didn't or haven't yet. Anyway, let's hedge our bets. Prediction, as Niels Bohr said, is very hard, and we'll be giving you that listicle towards the end of this episode. So in the meantime, we can help you understand why we've made the selection we have, because like all these lists, it's going to look a bit arbitrary, and perhaps it is. I mean, we're subject to our own biases and perspectives, but we want you to see that there's a serious point behind each choice, both the predictions that came true and the ones that didn't, which in each case points up something important about the role of science fiction in predicting the future. So we know science fiction does fulfill a predictive role. But is it a healthy thing? In a 1999 CNN interview, Larry King asked Stephen Hawking if science fiction was helpful, harmful, or neither. Or neither. It's useful, replied Hawking, both for stimulating the imagination and for diffusing fear of the future. But does it really diffuse fear by predicting the future? Some might say it stokes up those fears. We'll cover that question later. But first, let's pull focus a bit. Our urge to predict things that are going to happen in the future isn't by any means limited to the science fiction genre or to our own time. It's a, a natural part of the way we think what's going to happen next. So as we heard in our previous episode, Mary Shelley drew on the science that was novel in 1816 and projected it forward in Frankenstein, also showing the social implications of such a capability if it were to be actualised. But technological and social predictions of a similar sort can be traced back much, much further. In 1260, the Middle Ages, Roger Bacon predicted that the application of scientific knowledge would transform transportation. Cars can be made so that without animals they will move with unbelievable rapidity, he wrote in the Epistola de Secretis Operibus. I hope I'm not mangling that pronunciation as we Also, flying machines can be constructed so that a man sits in the midst of the machine revolving some engine by which artificial wings are made to beat the air like a flying bird. Didn't quite come true. Social prediction also has a long history. In 1516, Thomas More's Utopia launched a whole subgenre devoted to imagining and maybe predicting the perfect society. More's utopia was an island existing in his own time, but as better knowledge of world geography made extant utopias less likely, the focus of utopian stories shifted to the future. Another crucial factor for the development of the future imaginary was more accurate knowledge of the past. The founding of the Geological Society of London in 1807, very significant, marked the establishment of an empirical approach to determining the true age and nature of our planet. Planet, which began to kind of cast doubt on the accuracy of what it said in the Bible. On top of that, advances in science and technology that began in the 18th century grew more rapid and more profound in the 19th, prompting a flood of predictions in literary form, from the faux documentary to the scientific romances from which science fiction as we know it today emerged. And some of the predictions made in the late 19th century, particularly in France, are astonishingly accurate. So Hayley, our very own in-house oracle, please tell us about the sadly neglected French writer and illustrator Albert Robidaire. Pack Facts.

Albert Robidaire was born on May 14th, 1848, in Compiègne, northern France. He was a multi-talented artist, excelling as an illustrator, etcher, lithographer, and caricaturist. He edited and published the magazine La Caricature for over a decade. He also went on to write a trilogy of scientific romances marked by darkly comic narrative, which he illustrated himself. One of these, La Guerre au XXe Siècle, or War in the 20th Century, was written in 1869. It accurately predicted military use of field telephones, armoured personnel carriers, and chemical and biological weapons.

Amazing stuff. But listen to this. Rabida's vision of online learning in the 20th century from La Vie Électrique, the third book of his trilogy, is really remarkable. It depicts a woman watching a lecture via a telephonoscope, a device consisting of an oval video screen with a telephone-like audio apparatus attached. I'll put that up for the YouTube version. And the student is a woman. Adding an interesting social element to Rapida's technological foresight in an age when few women had any formal education. Rapida is even more strikingly prescient though in La Guerre au XXe siècle, that's War in the 20th Century, with his depiction of a 20th century family, complete with Victorian clothes and hairstyles, gathered round a large flat-screen TV to watch live news coverage of war in the Sahara. All it's missing is a to-camera report from a foreign correspondent like BBC's Jeremy Bowen. Which brings us to another Frenchman, you know, the one who actually invented the future. At any rate, that's the title of Franz Born's 1963 biography of Jules Verne, The Man Who Invented the Future. By Born's reckoning, Verne predicted submarines, helicopters, television, and the atomic bomb. In recognition of the latter, the US Navy named its first nuclear-powered submarine the Nautilus, after the famous underwater ship in Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Finally, for this is necessarily a brief tour of the future— past, we turn once again to H.G. Wells. He was influenced by Verne, of course, but went much further into what we recognize today as science fiction in his novels The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The Invisible Man, as well as in many short Patrick Parinder, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Reading and a former chair of the H.G. Wells Society, is a leading expert on the life and work of the man described as the last prophet of bourgeois Europe and its first futurologist. In his studies, Shadows of the Future: H.G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy, Parinder suggests that Wells was indeed a prophet. His role, just like the prophets of ancient times, was to inspire the masses to do better, to be better. But unlike his predecessors, Wells had science and technology to draw on, giving his prophecy greater specificity. The problem, as ever, is getting the masses to pay attention. Prophecy can be unsettling, even frightening. It makes demands of a prophet's audience. Better to stick with the familiar comforts of clairvoyance, horoscopes, and tarot cards. Or is it? Esri, is science fiction just another amusing diversion designed to calm our anxieties about what might happen, or is it really about seeing into the future? If so, what does that tell us about the people who write science fiction, and why do they mostly get things wrong, or badly wrong? Hang on, I'm looking out of the window. Nope, I can't see any signs of jetpacks and flying cars.

Well, the thing is that prediction is actually only one aspect of imagining what might happen in the future. As you were saying, there's prophecy, you know, with all the religious and literary manifestations and plenty of occult methods from examining goat centrales to deciphering the poetic quatrains of Nostradamus, or attempting to anyway. There are also the common everyday kinds of thinking about the future, anticipation, daydreaming, fantasizing, organizing, and so on. And psychologists gather all these methods under the umbrella of prospection, you know, the what is the prospect of, etc., and then subdivide them into 4 main groups. And so I think instructive to look at them. The first is intention. For example, you might say to yourself, okay, I'll do the shopping today. And the next is planning. So you say, right, I'll leave at 10:30, walk up the road, and get the bus to Waitrose, that sort of thing. And then there's simulation. You imagine going around the aisles of the supermarket, creating a mental image of what you want to get. And finally, we get to prediction. And the key thing here from a psychological perspective is that it involves both estimating the probability of specific outcomes and what our reactions to those outcomes will be. So if we stick with the shopping example, I might get on the bus and think, ah, Waitrose will be closed. Then I'll imagine my reactions if that turns out to be true. I might be cross or indifferent or maybe even relieved, certainly from a financial perspective. And that's the important thing in the case of science fiction, because along with suggesting the likelihood of specific scientific or technological outcomes, SF writers explore potential reactions, both of the individual and at societal level, to those outcomes. You know, Ray Bradbury didn't sit down one day and say, I predict people will have small devices in their ears for listening to music. It sort of emerged within the broader context of the story he was telling in Fahrenheit 451. Quick side note to YouTubers, particularly our American colleagues who say Fahrenheit 451, that is so wrong. It is Fahrenheit 451. Anyway, Bradbury wasn't doing quite the same thing as, as our friend Albert Robida, who used predicting daily life in the 20th century is the main kind of principle for his trilogy of scientific romances. And we have two paths to consider here. On the one hand, we've got the science fiction writer, and on the other hand, the science fiction reader. So let's put the writers to one side for a moment, because at the birth of what we call genre science fiction, which we've been discussing all along, the launch of Amazing Stories by Hugo Gernsback in 1926, The focus was on motivating readers to engage with the science and technology of their day. Gernsback thought the proper purpose of scientific— I can't even say it— scientifiction, as he called it.

It's difficult to say.

It is. Yeah, that's why we dropped that particular version. SF was to increase public understanding of science and actually to encourage people to take up careers in science and technology, albeit by stimulating their imaginations with thrilling stories.. And you could see that as a way of defusing fear of the future, as Professor Hawking said, as long as the future is only about science and technology. So if we take the Marxist analysis of Alessandro Portelli, as we heard in relation to the three laws of robotics, Asimov's prediction about robotics in general is an ideological tool intended to make technological innovation seem neutral because that's what suits capitalism. That's a kind of diffusing of fear, but only in the service of specific interests. Um, but it also doesn't account for the shift that occurred in the 1930s when leadership of the science fiction publishing world, which at that time was almost exclusively in America, passed from Hugo Gernsback to John W. Campbell, an astounding science fiction Campbell had a broader concept of the purpose of science fiction. The basic premise still remained, you know, extrapolating from current science and technology to future possibilities. But Campbell wanted writers to consider, as he put it, what the results look like when applied not only to machines but to human societies as well. And Campbell figured that people who read science fiction would actually cope better with the dramatic impacts of new technologies. So he was writing in 1957, after the atomic bomb and the launch of Sputnik. He claimed the people of the United States thought science fiction writers were kidding, that nuclear weapons and spaceflight were just amusing ideas to play with. But of course, having seen these things IRL, as we say now, in real life, Campbell became convinced that SF readers would be identified as experts on the future, with a better idea of what's coming next. And that they'd be consulted by non-science fiction writers accordingly. However, and this is where we, we, um, bring the science fiction writers back in, the '50s kind of turned out to be a high-water mark for SF prediction. We had Verne and Wells and all those Golden Age writers who predicted nuclear weapons, space flight, satellite communications, and robots. But then science fiction's track record of prediction becomes a lot less impressive.

Okay, I want to pick up on that last point and then go back to the dramatic announcement you made at the end of last week's episode about Mary Shelley predicting the death of God in Frankenstein. No offense to anyone of faith, but that's the nature of the beast when dealing with these crazy humans and their big ideas. How come science fiction writers in the early 20th century could be so accurate about some things and so way off about others? For example, well into the 1960s, Pretty much every science fiction writer imagined a more rapid expansion into space than was actually the case. Take a sober, scientifically trained writer like Arthur C. Clarke. In 1962, he confidently predicted a lunar landing in 1970—pretty much spot on—followed by nuclear-powered spaceships manned by cyborgs in the 1980s, colonisation of other planets by the year 2000, and control of the weather by 2010. All completely wrong, and still no sign of those jetpacks. Esri, we just barking up the wrong tree by looking for prediction in science fiction?

Maybe. One consideration is just the increasing speed of change. You know, that first generation of SF writers had decades to absorb the scientific thinking and debate about, you know, splitting the atom or building a rocket. But once nuclear weapons and satellites had become reality, followed of course by big advances in computing and other areas, the question became who controls all this technology. Um, then there's the diminishing proportion of SF writers who actually knew anything about science in the first place. Their predictions, or to be fair, perhaps we should say the predictions that sort of emerge from their stories, sort of lost their basis in reality. But does that even matter?

Um, I mean, Is it really their job to predict anything?

Not if you believe what they say about it. Isaac Asimov, who was a scientist of course, grumbled about this in a 1989 article, bemoaning, quote, "The general myth among laymen that somehow the chief function of a science fiction writer is to make predictions that eventually come true." And his old friend Harlan Ellison, who was definitely not a trained scientist, expressed similar frustration in a column for the Los Angeles Times on New Year's Day 1982. He was invited to make predictions for the year ahead, and he wrote this: In the mistaken belief that just because I occasionally write fantasy stories extrapolating some bizarre future America, I am privy to Delphic insight, the editors of the LA Times have asked me to unleash some wry conceits about what we can expect Little do they understand that writers are merely paid liars and we know no more than the rest of you. So no, they don't think it's their job.

Paid liars, like that. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said God is dead in his 1882 work The Gay Science, which is a bit of a mouthful. A loose translation and falls rather strangely on our ears nowadays. You could also call it, I suppose, the joyful science. Anyway, debates continue to rage about what he actually meant. His books being filled with cryptic aphorisms, lengthy fantasy sequences, and famously convoluted sentences. I have to say that the philosophy that I've read, it's much easier reading Nietzsche because it's just more interesting. But it's kind of interesting in quite a chilling way sometimes. I'm guessing that the link with Frankenstein is in the creation of life by secular science rather than by divine fear. Is that what you had in mind, Ezra? I have to say, Ezra, I was a bit confused by why you were introducing the whole God is dead thing here. And I had to go back and read through it a bit. But the more I kind of looked at the research into Frankenstein, as well, the more I began to see it's true. And you think of Matthew Arnold's poem Dover Beach, which is in Englit terms is supposed to symbolize the loss of faith, everybody turning away from God because of what we found out from geology and Darwin and science. And Mary Shelley was early in that speculation, but she kicked off this thing that perhaps leads to Nietzsche saying God is dead.

Is that what you had in mind? Yeah, exactly. It's, it's really deeply woven into the background and characters and narrative of Frankenstein. We don't have any direct evidence that Nietzsche had read Frankenstein, but there's plenty of subsequent discussion about the similarities in the themes that, you know, Shelley's novel and Nietzsche and his philosophical works. It gets pointed out that the death of God is referenced several times in The Gay Science. In varying contexts, which each adds a lot of nuance that's lost by simply repeating the phrase "God is dead," which is what we do more and more today in our meme-driven age. So what I want to focus on here is really the metaphorical aspect in relation to science. Frankenstein is about knowledge of the mysteries of creating life, something that always been previously considered the preserve of supernatural forces. Even in those myths and legends that feature artificial life, but, you know, were written before Frankenstein— for instance, the famous Golem of Prague only comes to life through its creator's occult knowledge of divine power and use of a sort of proto-software code, the Hebrew letters, which animate and eventually deanimate the golem. But Frankenstein really changed everything by this princ— you know, you can't say it was intended, but there was this predictive speculation that human-controlled science would obviate the, the need for supernatural involvement. Science replaces God. And that's really the starting point for any discussion of prediction, whether in science fiction or anywhere else. It's that shifting relationship between what we know now and what we imagine will be. You could argue, of course, that Frankenstein speculated about but didn't predict the death of God in the sense of prediction we're using. And actually may have been intended as a warning to avoid that outcome. But either way, the same relationship between current knowledge and imagined futures is at work even when you take a trip to the local bookies to put a tenner on your team winning the World Cup. And for that matter, in so-called prediction markets where traders bet on outcomes of specific events. Incidentally, this is being heavily advertised at matches in the 2026 World Cup, which is ongoing as we record this. Yes. Prediction markets have actually been around for decades. They might feel a bit more recent because of a court case in America in 2024 that saw the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is the federal regulatory body, fail in an attempt to prevent prediction markets offering contracts on the outcome of political events. 'Cause they could see the potential for disaster if you allow that kind of prediction to happen. But the court decision, as I say, they failed in stopping it. And that led to billions of dollars being traded on the outcome of the 2024 US presidential election. You don't need to— no conspiratorial suggestion here, but you don't have to think too hard about who made loads of money out of that. And then you get this huge growth in the prediction industry. And yes, that's what the consultancy firms are calling it. Prediction markets now offer contracts on everything from domestic elections to geopolitical conflicts, including, I think, pretty grotesquely, the exact number of deaths from a specific action or conflict and so on. Most prediction market contracts are binary, framed so that the outcome can only be yes or no. So traders will buy a contract like, will China invade Taiwan by the end of the current calendar year? And then sit on them because their value rises dramatically if there are any signs that point to that invasion happening. In other words, if the outcome of the contract looks more like yes than no. And you could be forgiven that, uh, for thinking all of this sounds a bit like Asimov's psychohistory from the Foundation saga that we discussed recently, but actually it's the diametric opposite. The predictive effect of psychohistory as you hear a lot in the TV show, if you watch that on Apple TV, is that the general population must be completely unaware that these outcomes have been predicted. Obviously, if people know an event is predicted by Harry Seldon's equations, they will either try to hasten it or stop it depending on their viewpoint. That's what gives Asimov's story its narrative drive. It's the sense of the efforts of the Foundation to stick to the plan and the efforts of foreseen and unforeseen actors like Empire and the Mule to change it. But you get the exact opposite in a prediction market where everyone must know about the selected event and both its possible and eventual outcomes. Otherwise, there will be endless arguments about who, who was actually right. There are serious problems with these prediction markets, in my opinion, um, but what they share with psychohistory is the risk of an individual deliberately interfering with an event's outcome. For instance, if a political candidate who looks likely to win an election is assassinated, or if groups of people change their behavior, like who they vote for, to ensure a particular outcome does or doesn't happen.

Let's not mention insider trading as well. So in those scenarios, it all comes down to money, doesn't it? And money is power. Um, but just a, a Come back on something you were saying earlier. I was really interested in what you were saying about the golem and the Hebrew texts that can deactivate or activate the golem. And again, again, with AI, we get people kind of using metaphors that associate it with magic and with spells. And it occurred to me the other day, there's a certain way in which a prompt It's a spell. And you get these kind of loads and loads of people giving, I have the 6 prompts which will make you masters of agentic AI and so on. You'll have seen all those on kind of LinkedIn and X and all the rest of it. And we are treating prompting as something like something out of Harry Potter, you know, spell-a-rame, you know, build a website for me. It's about, Like you said, the wishes of the genie out of the bottle gives you 3 wishes. And the message of that is always that you can have anything you want in the world as long as you know how to ask for it in exactly the right way. And it is magic, it's magical thinking. And we treat AI in that way as we do any powerful technology really. But anyway, let's go back to the script. Money's power. Are you saying that prediction is a form of power? That's what philosopher Carissa Velez said in her recent TED Talk. She compares the role of today's tech leaders with the court astrologers of old. They whisper in the ears of monarchs and presidents offering predictions which, say Velez, are just power play in disguise. Is prediction therefore power rather than knowledge? Well, yes, to some extent.

I mean, the thing with astrologers and of course the greatest of them all, Nostradamus, who was very much like some of these AIs in a sense, is that you can, with the benefit of hindsight, see the prediction in the ambiguity of what they say. But Valise makes interesting points about AI in relation to prediction, although ironically, because it is a TED Talk, it's completely shaped within that incredibly prescriptive TED format. And I agree with her that predictions are not facts, although I would question the assertion that facts belong in the past.

I would agree with her. I think facts do belong in the past because the, you know, as Aristotle says, the present and the future don't really exist. I mean, he says the past doesn't exist either. But the only kind of way we know that the past exists is because there are facts about it. And I think facts are belonging in the past, but carry on, develop your argument, Esri.

Well, to be fair, I slightly misquoted Professor Veliz there. She said facts belong to the past, and that was what I was— sorry, my fault for saying belong in the past, belong to the past, which I think is a slightly different emphasis. But even so, you know, any conflict in the world today will quickly disabuse you of the idea that people share facts about the past. It's, you know, it's extremely contentious to say the least. But she does offer a valid analysis, I think, of prediction markets, although she's arguing from within the paradigm she's trying to critique. So her conclusions are more polemical than philosophical. I think we're straying away from our, our listicle here.

Yes, let's get back in that rabbit hole. Get it back on track and tackle that listicle, starting with 3 predictions that didn't come true. 3 predictions from science fiction that have not come true. Okay, yet. So in first place is something we touched on earlier. Jetpacks, flying cars, transporter beams. So this comes under the heading of device fetishism for you. Eds, and I'm going to ask you about that why. So to go through those three things in turn, jetpacks actually work. They've worked since 1961. The problem is that they can never carry enough fuel to be useful because of a vicious circle in physics. The need for the engine to produce lift as raw downward thrust devours fuel. So I mean, if you think of most of the airplanes that we have and helicopters and so on, they all You can produce lift through like the shape of the wing or forward motion. You know, I remember my father's, who was an aircraft engineer, the diagrams in the books he had at home of kind of lift, thrust, drag, and for propulsion and so on. But if you want a jetpack, it's going to go straight up in the air. It's just pure naked lift you want. And that devours a lot of fuel. And adding more fuel adds more weight, which demands more thrust, which burns more fuel. So according to Wikipedia, jetpack users stay limited by the atmosphere, gravity, the low energy density of fuels, and the human body's unsuitedness to flight. So they're principally used for stunts. And stuntmen do it. It's a very dangerous thing because you've got all that kind of roaring flame going off. You might set fire to yourself. If the thing cuts out when you're, you know, yards up in the air, you've got to land somehow without just plummeting to earth. And of course, it's too short a distance for parachutes. So there's all these practical reasons why we don't have jetpacks. Getting on to flying cars. In 1926, now a flying car is genuinely reaching the market. If you have a spare million quid, Slovakia's Klein Vision AirCar, a gas-powered two-seater, transforms from car to aircraft in about 80 seconds. The first prototype has flown since 2021, completing over 170 flight hours, more than 500 takeoffs and landings. Crucially, its co-founder rejects the term flying car and calls it a roadable aircraft. The problem is here, you need a pilot's license, you need a runway. At the moment, these things can only take off and land between existing airports. It isn't a vertical takeoff machine you lift off from your driveway as, as we always thought of when we talked about flying cars. And there's all the bureaucracy of flight plans, airlines, pilot's license, etc., etc., all very necessary stuff. You know, people like my father used to do as an aircraft engineer, he would sign off planes to say that they're airworthy to fly, all that kind of stuff when you take stuff into the air. And you can't really imagine sort of people in these flying cars whizzing around over the top of a town willy-nilly, you know, you have other, or they'd all be bumping into each other all the time. Meaning that really it's just a fancy light aircraft we're talking about now. So drones are really where the futuristic action is with this sort of thing nowadays. When it comes to the third of these items, transporter beams, there is a real phenomenon called quantum teleportation. And it's been demonstrated in labs for decades, but it doesn't behave anything like the, the Star Trek, uh, transporter beam. Basically, it transfers the quantum state of one particle onto another distant particle. It does not send matter. It's not faster than light. And the key part, it destroys the original in the process. That destruction is forced by the no-cloning theorem. That means you can't make an identical copy of an unknown quantum state. So the comforting sci-fi idea scan you, keep you intact, build a copy over there is completely forbid— forbidden by physics. The only physically permitted version is the disturbing one. The original is annihilated as the copy forms. Then, even setting aside the physics of information, the scale defeats you. Human bodies is on the order of 10 to the power of 28 atoms, and to reconstruct you faithfully, you'd need to capture the quantum state of each one. The information involved is so vast that physicists have estimated it. And apparently there was a back-of-the-envelope calculation done here from the University of Leicester student group, concluded that transmitting one person's data would take longer than the current age of the universe. I sort of feel that that last explanation has taken longer than the current age of the universe. So I apologize for that, but I just found this really fascinating. So Uh, because it also made me think of the Christopher Priest book, um, The Prestige. Exactly. I'm not going to go into why it made me think of that because that is a massive, massive spoiler, um, so we'll leave it there. So, Esri, talk about why you group these under device fetishism.

Well, to be honest, it is one of the core attractions of SF, mostly, although not exclusively, for male fans. Um, it's the same urge that drives so-called gear— boys and toys— boys and toys, gear acquisition syndrome in musicians and photographers, motor enthusiasts, and so on.

Well, yes, I mean, you could see the results of that in the back here. I've got boxes of pedals.

Yes, you know, yeah, really. And it is that obsession with having the right bit of gear or the best or the latest. It's the thing that's going to solve all the problems that I've had with my reverb or whatever it happens to be. Um, it's exactly the same process in device fetishism in science fiction. It's the gadget that, whether it's just doing it for purposes of, uh, you know, the narrative structure of a particular story, or because the author actually thinks this is something that's going to happen. You know, it, in a sense, it doesn't really matter. Um, in science fiction, it's about gear, and that is all— sorry, it's about gear that is just always slightly out of reach. Um, and that has its value. It can be exciting, and as we're discovering, sometimes it can be predictive. And it also gets heavily exploited by consumerism. You think of all those plastic lightsabers that littered the Earth after Star Wars came out. Um, but I don't think it's useful in the sense that Stephen Hawking meant. Um, I think what makes science fiction truly useful is the broader socially oriented future thinking, um, that we get in SF from the New Wave of the 1960s onwards.

So next up universal nudism. Clearly this didn't happen because, as people on the YouTube version will be able to see, we're both clothed from the waist up at least. Mwahaha! But who thought it would, Esri, and why?

Well, this is one of my favorites, and with apologies because it is a bit puerile. Through scientific observation, Robert Heinlein noted that the amount of clothing people in Western societies were required to wear had decreased steadily since Victorian times. So in his 1952 essay entitled "Whereto," he predicted that total nudity would be commonplace in the future. It wasn't a science fiction story as such. It was a review by Heinlein of what he, as a science fiction writer, could see coming. So there is the possibility that he had his tongue firmly in his cheek, so to speak, when he said it. But nevertheless, You know, it might say more about what he would like to see, but we should leave it at that, I think.

I know that part of the whole free love vibe of the '60s involved a big move for people to get their kit off at every opportunity, including at open-air festivals and stuff like that. And Heinlein is perhaps part of that era, as part of that movement, as it were, towards nudity himself. But I have a Jack Nicholson anecdote from that time that perhaps does something to explain why it didn't really catch on. Jack lived on Mulholland Drive in Hollywood, famously close to a lot of other bad boys of his ilk of the movies. Here's a segment for an interview he did with Playboy magazine. I won't attempt to do the voice, and I'll also try to control my eyebrows, which you can hardly help doing when reading Jack Nicholson's quotes. So here's Jack Nicholson talking to Playboy. I once decided I would get over being self-conscious about nudity, so I did an experiment. I decided to wear nothing. I lived here in my house as a nudist. It was summertime, so warmth wasn't a problem. I did it for 3 or so months in the '60s. Once I decided something, I don't do it partially. So when I came to this, I was nude no matter who came by. Playboy. Who did come by? Jack, all kinds of people. Roger Corman came by. Roger Corman being the famous film director of B-movies where Jack Nicholson started his career. Roger Corman came by and didn't like it much. I wasn't throwing my wang around or anything, but it startled him nevertheless. My daughters understandably didn't like it. If I had an interview with you, I would have done it nude. I found it very comfortable. Playboy. Did some visitors embrace it? Did some join you? Jack Nicholson. Harry Dean Stanton loved it. He couldn't wait to get over here and be nude. I think Jack is going to feature in the next prediction too. This one is first contact. Human alien contact will happen one day. We seem to assume is about to happen, has already happened, but they're keeping quiet about it. And this is where we really make people hate us. By putting that in the didn't happen list here, including the 56% of US listeners who tell surveys that they believe in aliens. And lately there's been a flurry of media excitement about all things extraterrestrial that's brought it to the fore again. Steven Spielberg has just released Disclosure, I think Disclosure Day, I think it's called, almost 50 years after Close Encounters, and it has the same plot. He has also gone on record recently as saying that he has shifted his previously agnostic view about aliens, though his position is still fairly ambiguous. And let's be honest, he has a movie to promote. In February of this year, on Brian Tyler Cohen's podcast, ex-President Obama was asked, are aliens real? And answered, they're real, but I haven't seen them, and they're not being kept in Area 51. It went viral as Obama confirms aliens. Within a day or two, you had to walk it back. I'm 'the universe is vast, so life likely exists somewhere,' he said. I'm paraphrasing. But the distances make visitation unlikely, and he saw no evidence during his presidency that extraterrestrials made contact. In the same month, President Trump directed agencies to declassify records on UAPs/UFOs, alien and extraterrestrial life, citing public interest after Obama's comments. Slightly mischievous, I think. Multiple tranches of disclosures followed, including documents plus images, videos, audio from the CIA, the FBI, NASA, Pentagon, and historical items, including a 1949 Army flying saucer study. The government has disclosed much previously hidden UAP information and admits a large fraction of sightings are unexplained, but it has not confirmed alien contact. And the contact cover-up claims rest on contested insider testimony like the Pentagon's own UAP office. And the Pentagon's own UAP office in fact rejects it. Look, SETI has listened since 1960 with nothing confirmed against a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars. That's the Fermi paradox. If life is likely, where is everybody? Obama's probably life, probably no visitors is essentially the mainstream scientific position. For me, I must admit, it's just lights in the sky. I'm sorry about that. But Ez, what do you think?

Well, I think the keyword there is probably, probably life, probably no visitors. The truth is we don't know, and that's why it's so contentious. There are the conspiracy theorists who believe that we know, or some of us know and are keeping it secret. There is the possibility that anybody from, or anything from somewhere else who comes here will have better technology than we do, so we wouldn't even detect them. There are just too many variables, too many unknowns. So it is a big failed prediction in, in terms of science fiction where it occurs obviously over and over again. We haven't met any aliens. There really is no prospect of it, although of course it could happen tomorrow. We don't know. Despite all the books and all the movies, from the serious ones like Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, based on the short story by Ted Chiang, which I think—

I think that's a brilliant movie. I really like that. It is.

It's a great movie and features an anthropologist, of course. But there are also the ridiculous ones, which I have to admit I like. Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, which is an absolutely brilliant movie, I think.

With a stellar cast, including of course Jack Nicholson. Clothes. Yes. And Tom Jones.

What's not to like of science fiction?

And Tom Jones, yeah.

Science fiction movie with Tom Jones in it. Anyway.

Yeah, I think it's a paradox actually that although it's a failed prediction, I think some of the best movies have come out of this first contact.

And that's perhaps why Spielberg is repeating the plot. The difference is, of course, that he has much, much better special effects now than he had 50 years ago. And that's another element of the way science fiction has taken over the modern world, because the things we see that are fictitious on screens are just so much more convincing to our brains it becomes harder to tell them apart from reality. Do you remember the first Superman movie? You'll believe a man can fly. Yeah. When we watch it now, it looks really clunky. But then if you watch the recent Marvel TV shows or, you know, the Batman and Superman films, it's indistinguishable from reality.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so that's our 3 failed predictions. But before we move on to the ones that actually did come true, that we live amongst every day, it's worth a look at one that didn't quite make the cut, although in many ways it's spot on. It's also worth pausing before we wrap up to ask the question: is science fiction really in the business of prediction at all? Is it just the audience for science fiction that gets so hung up on this? Business of prediction. What do you think, Ezra?

Well, as we've already heard, science fiction writers like Asimov and Harlan Ellison were not happy about shouldering the responsibility for predicting the future. Another contemporary of theirs, Frederick Pohl, made a similar objection to this idea that, you know, prediction is in his job description. It isn't really science fiction's business to describe what science is going to find, he said. It is much more science fiction's business to say what the human race will make of it all. So Paul is still very much tying science fiction to science itself, as did Goernsback and Campbell and Asimov and so many of the greats of, of the early science fiction world. There's a similar comment from the cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin introducing a 1966 anthology called Future Perfect. Science fiction, he noted, is growing with science, evaluates and relates it meaningfully to the rest of existence. One of the problems with this is something we talked about back in episode 1, and that is that you mentioned it, um, earlier this today as well, the seriously weird turn science took as we entered the 20th century with superposition, entanglement, zombie cats, and all that quantum mechanics stuff. That could put SF writers out of business altogether. So I think the change from the early and sometimes quite accurate predictions to the later, much less accurate ones was already foreshadowed, if not itself predicted, within science. So rather than staying with the predictable and stable world of Newtonian science, where reality obeys rules and science grows by sticking to those rules, once science fiction had in effect caught up with science, it also became a lot weirder. So hence the new wave. And, and, uh, if you think of J.G. Ballard and others who, um, proposed the inward turn in SF— I'm not interested in outer space, I'm interested in inner space, as Ballard said— there's just much more ambiguity, uncertainty, and the unknowable, both in the science that is portrayed and in the way they tell the stories in the fiction itself. So, not surprisingly, people started using the term speculative fiction much more, even though Heinlein invented it in the '50s, because they wanted to break out of this kind of straitjacket of writing stories that have to make extrapolations about future scientific and technological events in order to say something about human responses to those events. You know, life is just a lot messier than that, making it hard to predict anything, as Niels Bohr pointed out. But paradoxically, I think this reduces the gap between scientific and non-scientific explanations of the universe. Just like you were saying about AI becoming more and more like magic, you know, the difference between quantum science on the one hand and the occult has narrowed since the beginning of the 20th century. Maybe that's something we could delve into in a future episode. But yeah. I just wanna highlight one, I think, important prediction from science fiction we didn't include in those top 3 predictions that came right, which we're gonna hear in a minute. And that's J.G. Ballard's 1962 novel, The Drowned World. It's a great example of prediction that's not about a new gadget. The novel is seen as the foundational text of cli-fi, which is climate fiction. And although it doesn't predict, sorry, it doesn't predict climate change as a result of human activity, because the global flooding that occurs in the story is the result of, I think, solar flares and other external factors. And that kept it out of our final 3 predictions that came true. I think that somehow misses the point of what Ballard was saying. What he does very accurately predict is that mix of apathy, selfishness, and emotional insecurity in people's responses to a disaster that are so visible today, for example, in the acceptance and adaptation in the face of climate catastrophe. There's nothing new about those characteristics, but Ballard is kind of contrasting them with climate change in The Drowned World, as well as in other novels like The Drought and The Crystal World, in a way that I think is very— it's a very worrying prediction. He's saying, you know, "Yeah, stuff is gonna happen, and we're just not gonna handle it very well," regardless of what the actual stuff is.

I really like The Drowned World, and I think it'd be worth, well, we could do an episode about J.G. Ballard, but we could do an episode about The Drowned World on its own, I think. I think it's a really interesting book. But anyway, okay, so thanks for that, Ace. Drum roll, here's the big 3. 3 predictions from science fiction that actually did come true. Number 1, and we've covered these, so we'll get through them fairly quickly, I hope. Landing on the moon, Arthur C. Clarke. Of course, we should note all the others that didn't happen, which we mentioned early. And this is kind of the point about science fiction predictions, that they're a bit scattergun. He was eerily kind of on the money about predicting the first landing on the moon. And all the other things that he predicted we predicted would follow from that didn't follow from that. And of course the vagaries of kind of governments and business and process and geopolitics and all the rest of it are completely difficult. I think there is the problem with a lot of very technologically, very science-driven people is they see a capability and they think, well, it's just logical that you would next do this and then next do that. Just as perhaps it seems logical that confronted with the truth of climate overwhelming scientific evidence, you would not be saying drill, baby, drill. But it's a weird world. And I think there's— And this is what makes prediction difficult.

I was reading something about Philip K. Dick recently, and I think his response to Clarke saying that, you know, we'd have cyborgs flying spaceships into the solar system in the 1980s would be, yeah, that did happen. You just don't know about it. Oh yeah, yeah. You know, that uncertainty really comes into play again.

Okay, so number 2, AirPods/wearables. I'm conscious of the fact that you're speaking through AirPods at the moment, Ed. I am, yeah. And what I say about this is sometimes device fetishism wins because AirPods, as we said right at the beginning, is something that has actually arrived. It's quite interesting, I think, Looking into the development of AirPods and trying to get a link to science fiction predictions is a bit harder than you'd think. I mean, the one really documented link I could find is Jony Ive of Apple, who was head of the design team at the time the iPods were developed. So it's hard either to pin down a particular inventor of the AirPod, but he said he was directly influenced by the stormtroopers' uniforms in Star Wars., but just in the kind of visual look of the things. Getting a line from science fiction influence through to that actually more directly gets you to Walkmans. Yes. Than it does to AirPods.

But the question is then, it's the psychohistory paradox again, because if it's a prediction that people know about, they do their best to make it happen. So, did, you know, the AirPod— it wasn't directly predicted by Ray Bradbury, although, you know, there's obvious similarities. But somebody, you know, people read that. A lot of people who work in tech read science fiction. We know that. It may be it didn't predict it. It encouraged it. And it wouldn't have happened if Bradbury hadn't written that in that way. And that's the paradox that becomes very difficult to unpick. Is it prediction, or is it— encouragement to do it.

Yeah, it's kind of in the water, as it were. It's in the air and people know about it. It is harder to kind of pin down direct attributions. I mean, with Elon Musk, it's fairly easy. I mean, we know that he was, it's well documented that he's a science fiction freak. But Steve Jobs, for instance, was not particularly influenced by science fiction. I don't think his claimed influences are all things Buddhism and Ayn Rand and slightly airy-fairy things like that and philosophers. He's not so, it's hard to make a direct line, you know, with some of those Apple products and science fictions. Sometimes it's fairly easy to do as with Musk.

This may be slightly scurrilous, but I would say that if you had been invited to Steve Jobs' house, he probably had all his science fiction in the back room where you couldn't see it. And when you get in his library, you'd see all the great philosophers and, and literary figures, but secretly he was reading Heinlein and Clarke and Asimov anyway.

Yeah, of course. Yes. And possibly all that stuff is burnishing the legacy and so on, all that philosophy stuff. So lastly, we come to our last one, the age of Trump. This one is going to be contentious, but I'm using the age of Trump to cover a very wide worldwide movement, which nowadays comes under labels. So at some point somebody's going to write the history of this part of the 21st century, and it's going to be impossible to ignore a big change in geopolitics that comes around about this time. You have the growth of right-wing movements, a very different character to conservatism, which used to be about keeping things and now seems to be about things that it's not always that easy to understand. We have the rise of populist movements everywhere. We have a kind of post-truth world in some people's view. We have a very different media landscape and so on. So I'm bracketing this all as the age of Trump. And some of the things we can cite here are the mule, the character in Foundation. This is the thing that kind of bucks the predictive power of psychohistory is you have this kind of random chaos actor, an incredibly powerful individual with powers to control and shape people's thinking processes. The Mule does it through kind of telepathy. Trump does it through social media posts that go on all night, whatever. But There's an interesting parallel, I think. There is a Heinlein novel, which I'm afraid I haven't read, and I don't know which one it is, but Paul Baxish brought this to my attention. Thank you very much for that. Heinlein predicted a future where 7 men would own all the money in the world. And now of course we have the Mag Seven, this enormous concentration of wealth in the hands of some billionaires. That is a fairly new thing that has really changed. And it does come up time and again in science fiction, the idea of oligarchical rule. And of course, we have Christopher Priest's nightmare visions of an authoritarian Britain, which covered it in an earlier episode. And Ez, I'd like you to recall the John Sladek story you mentioned earlier.

Yeah, because that absolutely nails the idea that somehow a science fiction writer can, if not predict, somehow foresee this set of things that you have bracketed as the age of Trump, but describe it in such an astonishingly accurate way. He wrote that story, The Great Wall of Mexico, which we described before about a US president building a wall on the border with Mexico. And there are so many examples of this if you know where to look. There's Octavia Butler's brilliant 1993 novel Parable of the Sower, where she gives a detailed description of the world in 2024, ravaged by human-caused climate change, wildfires burning much of California, water supplies increasingly scarce and contested, local and regional governments subsumed by feudalistic corporate entities while central government becomes increasingly authoritarian. Um, which all absolutely rings true today. And in the sequel, Parable of the Talents, published in 1998. She describes the rise of white Christian nationalism under the leadership of a president who vows to make America great again. Now, you know, it's like you were saying about AirPods, maybe it was just in the air, in the water, that maybe somebody had used that phrase before Trump actually adopted it. Who knows? Back facts.

Long before Trump, Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign used "Let's make America great again" against Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton echoed the phrase in 1992, and Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign used it too. Trump trademarked the slogan in 2012, which is why it became so strongly identified with him.

But it's not gadget prediction, and that's the point. Science fiction had to adapt to the way science and society changed after World War II, and I think I've said this several times with the use of the atom bomb and so on, the era of complexity and uncertainty. Um, and I think, you know, there have been some positives from that, greater diversity and access to these kinds of ideas. Um, but throughout this period from, say, 1945 or shortly after, science fiction has become a vital asset in the struggle for human survival, precisely because its predictions have shifted from 'You'll have a jetpack or a flying car' to 'You'll have to think and feel differently about your fellow humans.' By the way, Octavia Butler wrote a great essay on prediction entitled 'A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,' which is well worth looking up. And she offers 4 rules. We don't have time to go into them today, but just mentioning them I think is worthwhile. Number 1: Learn from the past. Number 2, respect the law of consequences. Number 3, be aware of your own perspective. And number 4, count on the surprises. I think Clarke may have benefited from knowing those rules. He had— he wrote a book called Profiles of the Future in 1962 where he said, too great a burden of knowledge can clog the wheels of imagination. That's what we have to avoid because we need imagination more than anything right now to help us solve the terrifying problems that we're accumulating. And obviously AI does not have imagination, only humans do as far as we know, maybe octopuses do. As Swedish historian Jenny Andersson put it, once the excitement of early technological prediction faded, Even where realistic solutions to world problems were suggested, solving future problems became a question of the ability to project imaginative solutions onto world problems. And I would argue that's exactly what science fiction does, projects imaginative solutions onto world problems. Marvelous.

Um, I will be extremely grateful to whoever can write in and remind me, uh, who it was who said The first thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history. It was Papa Hegel.

We had that a few episodes ago. Oh, Papa Hegel.

All right. Okay. No need to write in. Save your keyboard strokes. So there you have it. Science fiction can predict the future, but that's not the most important thing about it. So now this is the end of our first season. It's the last episode of the first season The Tech Imaginarium. We haven't worked out how we're going to sustain this and schedule it yet, to be absolutely honest, but I really do personally hope that we can because I've really enjoyed doing it. I've written myself a little note here rather than scripting this ending to make it more spontaneous, but I'll just read the note. Tearful end of series words while clutching hanky, jabbing at eyes. So please let us know what you've liked about it and all suggestions for future episodes considered. Let us know what you didn't like about it. I'm a big boy, I can take it. And I'll leave it to you as to say your own goodbyes and sign off for now.

I will leave you with the greatest prediction of all, of course, from John Sladek, who said, "The future, according to some scientists, will be exactly like the past." only far more expensive. So with that, live long and prosper.

You've been listening to Tech Imaginarium, how science fiction made the modern world. If you'd enjoyed the show, make sure to subscribe on your platform of choice, and it really helps other people find us if you leave a positive review there. Tell your friends, tell your enemies too. Tech Imaginarium is a LearnHack podcast, which Produced and hosted by John Helmer. Written by John Helmer and Esri Karlabak. Music is by Nick Dwyer and Flintet.