In 1967, the Star Trek episode Court Martial had the falsification of video evidence by a computer expert as it’s major plot point. I remember watching it as a kid, and not understanding how someone could fake a video recording. But, here we are, 47 years later and “deep fakes” are becoming a big problem. I think it’s pretty incredible that a writer in the 60’s could extrapolate what technology might be capable of in the future. At that time, computers were barely able to generate simple graphics.
Star Trek had flat screens instead of tubes.
The wireless ear pieces for Comms like our Bluetooth ones.
Those solid state datachips are much closer to a USB fob or SD chip than the disks and tapes of 1966-69.
But the lack of seatbelts was strange, even for the time I thought.
BTW: 57 years, not 47.
Oh, right - I was counting in Star Dates…
Nothing will ever compare to Murray Leinster’s “A Logic Named Joe”
You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it’s got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It’s hooked in to the tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch “Station SNAFU” on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an’ whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin’ comes on your logic’s screen. Or you punch “Sally Hancock’s Phone” an’ the screen blinks an’ sputters an’ you’re hooked up with the logic in her house an’ if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today’s race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin’ Garfield’s administration or what is PDQ and R sellin’ for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin’ full of all the facts in creation an’ all the recorded telecasts that ever was made—an’ it’s hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country—an’ everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an’ you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you, an’ keeps books, an’ acts as consultin’ chemist, physicist, astronomer, an’ tea-leaf reader, with a “Advice to the Lovelorn” thrown in. The only thing it won’t do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, “Oh, you think so, do you?” in that peculiar kinda voice. Logics don’t work good on women. Only on things that make sense.
The entire visual computer-driven internet predicted in 1946, before anyone even knew of computers and far before anyone had hooked up a screen to them. And he gets it down to the personal and trivial, at a time when the future was supposed to be impersonal and weighted with importance. Absolutely remarkable.
Last iteration of this thread, I voted for “The Machine Stops”
I’m gonna go with World War Z, because it accurately predicted how 21st century America would respond to a pandemic - the government attempts to ignore the problem, news pundits downplay the danger, quacks start selling snake oil remedies to make a quick buck, the media tries to make an entertainment spectacle out of it, and by the time people start grasping how big the problem actually is it’s far too late to contain it.
We were lucky that our pandemic was just a highly contagious cold and not the living dead.
Brazil predicted with rather staggering accuracy how office workers of the future would waste time on the job:
(1:02)
I now carry on my phone the ability to translate foreign languages both spoken and in print. This might not be quite as advanced as Louis Wu’s translator discs, but it’s damned remarkable. Larry Niven could be quite prescient.
Including that it will be used for open.
But did he anticipate autocorrect?
Not as advanced as you think: Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood also had a flat screen.
The emergence of AI and all the questions about how to manage it…
Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
The January 1958 Popular Mechanics featured a flat screen television. Images of the future had depicted them in the 19th century. That one was pretty much a gimme by Star Trek.
Way back when, the Dick Tracy comic strip featured “Two Way Wrist Radios” which even had video screens for race to face.
There was a movie done on the cusp of sound, in fact it was released in two different versions, a silent one (with script cards) and a sound one. It was called High Treason, and for a movie, it wasn’t too bad at understanding the future (although somewhat hit or miss). It predicted the likelihood of world war happening again in 1940 (11 years in their future), and it projected that the two chief antagonists would be arms manufacturers secretly mongering war in a cabal for their own profit, and a huge peace movement supported by ordinary people, with the official governments as mostly helpless pawns. It predicted regional government of Europe (and also for other regions) and assassination as a political tool. They have something like television, which was not such a stretch for 1929.
There were a lot of things they got wrong, such as everyone dressing in quasi-military clothing, and a sort of pre-cursor to Big Brother. But for a film and for its time, I thought they did fairly well. The sound version was lost for a long time, but apparently recently re-discovered, and you can see it now on YouTube. Warning: the acting and pacing are excruciating (but at least you can understand every single word).
Back when 3.5" “floppy” disks were the standard for portable computer data storage, I saw a number of people point out the similarity (shape and size) with the square “tapes” that were used in TOS.
I’d also note that the form of the original communicator was not unlike that of the “flip phones” from the early 2000s, though the way it was used was different: held out in the hand, like using the “speaker” function on your cell phone, rather than holding it up against your ear, which was probably the more common way that flip phones were used.
The “PADD” portable tablet device in ST:TNG was very similar, in form and function, to tablets like the iPad, which came out 20 years later.
Fahrenheit 451 had flat screen TVs way earlier than this.
As for Court Martial, faking documents was hardly new. The more prescient thing in that show was that Kirk’s boss was a Black admiral. Back then that concept was pretty radical.
I agree that A Logic Named Joe and The Machine Stops are both more prescient. The Machine Stops has what is basically a Zoom webinar/talk. I’m going to running one of them with everyone on line and the speaker on the other side of the country in a few hours.
George Orwell’s 1984 should be on a list like this.
- Newspeak (propagandistic language that is characterized by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings)
- Fake News (Telescreens in 1984)
- Perpetual War (the US has been at war for 228 years out of 246 years)
- Speakwrite (automatic transcription by a computer)
- Versificator (AI makes content like music and writes books and whatnot)
- Big Brother (the level of the state watching what you are doing is pretty extreme today)
“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” (seems this can be applied to anyone who supports Trump)
Here’s the Wikipedia entry for the 1929 High Treason:
It started production just before the silent era in film ended and ended production just after the silent era ended, so it was released in two versions, a silent one and a talking one. There are some differences between the two versions besides the dialog. On YouTube, search on the words High Treason 1929 and you’ll find both versions available for free.
Arthur C. Clarke envisioned the internet with pretty good accuracy as well as communications satellites. Of course, at the time he was writing those things were somewhat in the works, so I suspect he was sort of reporting from what he knew was happening in tech.
He also talked about space elevators, which I hope will become reality in my lifetime.