I spend too much time online, and I’m still not satisfied or rich… and my wife’s still alive. Sigh…
Your problem is that you’re spending entirely too much time online. If you want success, you have to take the information and go out and implement it yourself.
I’ll bet if you applied yourself you’d have a dead wife by now, and be on the run from the police of two different states for armed robbery.
Golly, thanks, Cal!
Will post later from road – if time.
What amazing about it? Science fiction writers are not visionaries and rarely get the future correct.
That’s because they’re not writing about the future: they’re writing about the present.
The computer in the Tracy-Hepburn film Desk Set works kind of like Google; Hepburn is chief of the reference library at a TV network and Tracy is a consultant there to install the computer that the staff is sure will eliminate their jobs. In the end they learn that it will help them (and we see that Hepburn is faster and smarter than the computer anyway).
That’s pretty much what Harry Turtledove’s “Hindsight” is about.
Yes, exactly. But more than that, the present they’re writing about is the cool new stuff just coming out, not the stuff that’s old and boring.
The internet started flooding into sf in the early 1980s, after Vernon Vinge’s True Names and because of the influence of Gibson’s *Neuromancer *in creating cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is about very little other than the internet. (Steampunk followed, which was the internet anachronistically pushed back into Victorian days.)
After cyberpunk was beaten into the ground, the next wave emerged in the early 2000s, with books like Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Bruce Sterling’s Zeitgeist, which explored worlds in which social societies have coalesced from the web.
The internet was apparent in the early 80s because PCs became common in the early 80s and sf writers could see the effects both though logical extrapolation, like Gibson, and because they were already on Arpanet, like Jeff Duntemann and Geoffrey Landis. GEnie started in 1985 and the sf section was one of the major contributors to traffic.
I personally put the beginnings of the modern computer era to Delany’s Nova, in which everybody was literally plugged in to the computers. (Sockets in their spines.) And *Nova *is 1968.
Deep Thought from the Hitchhiker’s Guide is kind of like the SDMB search engine; returns largely incomprehensible results, and takes millions of years. 
In the story, Joe was a fluke: Nobody (except, presumably, Joe) knew just what manufacturing “defect” enabled Joe to do what he did. It wasn’t just the disabled censorship circuits: He was correlating data in ways not previously thought possible. So even if people wanted to go back to free information, they would have had a hard time doing so.
Also, the “malfunctioning” unit was a home terminal, not one of the big “tanks”. The fact that a home terminal, designed to be no different from any of the other millions of terminals, was able to change the entire system speaks to a certain degree of decentralization. The terminals (and presumably tanks) were all made by one company, but that one company still made them in a decentralized way.
I know that, but their stock-in-trade is extrapolation and the future. Even when they’re writing about the present, they do it in future drag. And they try to get the future correct, or at least plausible. And, of course, often they do a creditable job.
This is commonplace. You’tre a published science fiction writer and I’m a reader of long standing. I don’t mistake SF for what it isn’t. But don’t tell me one of the draws to your chosen field isn’t the thrill of contemplating how well and completely some bit of future prediction is – both before it comes true and, arguably more, afterwards. I’m still amazed by Verne’s track record, and the incredibly detailed futures of Heinlein.
that said, some things have been missed pretty significantly. Veerne’s Nautilus not only didn’t have torpedos, it didn’t have a periscope. Damned near everyone seemed to be predicting picturephones, from Verne, through Metropolis through mainsttream sf from the 40s on. As a corollary, people didn’t forsee television as a one-way entertainment medium, but as twp-way communication. So SF predicted TV completely incorrectly. The standard vision of Robots and Computerrs was way off.
So it’s perhaps not surprising that they goofed up the social implications of computers, getting it exactly backwards from that of TV – it’s not a one-way source of information, but a two- (or more-) way means of communication. But I am surprised that more people didn’t really foresee the implications, with the counterexample already in place.
In chapter 2 of The Killing Machine (1962) Jack Vance has an IPCC (Interplanetary Police Co-ordination Company - a bit like Interpol) area manager use a console to call up all sorts of records and information, and he’s able to amend them as required - like a private crime-wiki that all the IPCC branches have access to.
Later, in chapter 6, the hero uses the local branch of a technical problem-solving company (whose name I forget) to find complete details of an obscure artificial leg mechanism he remembers seeing on a distant planet, and later uses the same company to ask which planet a particular animal he has a description of might come from. The results include a nursery rhyme fragment, so it’s obviously not just technical data the company has stored.
It’s not clear, afaik, whether he has to visit their office - he compiles a request and receives the answer 12 minutes later as print outs, etc. but whether that’s handed over to him, or printed out in his office it doesn’t say.
Still, it’s some sort of search engine, although I guess it’s possibly only their own databases it searches…
SF writers didn’t predict Google or today’s connected world because that is sociology rather than technology.
Sociological prediction is not just hard: it’s impossible. Nobody has ever done it. And that’s in all fields, not just sf.
It’s worse in sf because most of what we consider today’s world and therefore the “future” to be is sociological change rather than technological change. None of the inventions really matter. It’s how the inventions are used that matter. That’s why the space program failed. There was no sociological use for it. It was pure invention. Nobody ever cares about pure invention. SF writers thought that space in and of itself would transfer society. Why? Mostly they were extrapolating off western history and the myth of the frontier. But there were sound practical reasons for moving west that never emerged in space.
By and large, SF writers are utter morons about sociology. (Please don’t mention psychohistory, which tried to turn sociology into a technology without spending much time on either society or people. SF writers borrowed from Spengler and Technocracy the way they did from Tesla and Relativity, sweeping themes rather than details.) For that matter, since so many are Libertarians, they are also morons about government and economics. (Libertarianism is to the social sciences as Creationism is to the physical sciences: a religious tenet with no empirical backing.) This is actually an advantage in artificial world building because of its simplifying assumptions, but carries nothing over to the real world.
Not surprisingly, relatively few SF writers have ever emerged from a social science background, even a minority of the ones like Michael Bishop, Ursula K. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, Cordwainer Smith, and James Tiptree Jr. who introduced sociological themes into the field had formal training. (Jerry Pournelle has Ph.D.'s in both political science and psychology[!], and still manages to be a libertarian.)
If SF writers were food critics they would talk about advances in stove technology and new types of utensils, but either never mention or never get right what food was served. That’s not their field of interest. Commentary on why SF writers who are supposed to be visionaries didn’t foresee salsa sales exceeding those of ketchup miss the point rather spectacularly.
We’ve all done that already. Haven’t you?
Of course, you do get occasional gems, like Heinlein not only predicting the pocket phone, but that people would sometimes find them a nuisance, and sometimes deliberately leave them behind or bury them in their luggage so they couldn’t be bothered.
And while Heinlein certainly seemed to think that libertarianism would make for a better society, he also seemed to recognize that, human nature being what it is, it’d never last. Consider the development of Lunar society in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and later in The Rolling Stones and The Cat who Walks through Walls: Prof del la Paz, the spiritual father of the nation, wanted no government at all, but by the time the rest of the Founders got through with it, they were already drifting significantly from his vision. And by the time of The Rolling Stones, there’s enough regulation and bureaucracy that the Stones are willing to jet off to the Outer System with no particular destination just to get away from it all.
Would Brunner’s Shockwave Rider count? Published in 1975, it has a worldwide computer network which is used to look up information. Heck, he even predicted Wikileaks by having his protagonist set it up at the end to make available all the secret, nefarious information that the government had been up to.
tanstaafl reminds me that Heinlein did not coin either the phrase or the acronym, which had been around al least since since the 1940s.
That his fans not only claim this for him, but claim about 10,000 other things that he never invented, is the flip side of visionitis.
Asimov’s “The Last Question” also portrays access to a Multivac/Univac etc terminal.
Pete Townshend wrote an opera that touched on the idea of a global computer network
Most of the songs from this ended up on the Who’s Next album
Their next album after what? Who Are You?
In The Mote in God’s Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in 1974, they not only had computers that could be accessed for any information they wanted, but they could access it on their smartphones by wireless connection. Jerry Pournelle owns an iPhone now and explicitly compares it to the concepts from the novel.
Specific to Google Pournelle also said:
Google was founded in 1998.