“Some are very good, but most are very mediocre” is true of anything anywhere. What you have to show is that the successes are not just randomly distributed among all the predictions but are concentrated among a few predictors, while there are hardly any successful predictions among all the other predictors. You need to compile a very full list of predictions made by many science fiction authors and determine which predictions were successful. Then you need to do the proper statistics to show that the predictions aren’t just randomly scattered but are heavily clustered among a few writers.
Now you’re going to say, “But that’s way beyond my ability to do research on.” That’s exactly the problem. This is why, for instance, people continue to believe that some financial analysts can make accurate predictions about the economic future, but most of them can’t. It’s really a matter of the few good predictions being scattered around randomly among financial analysts. After the fact, it’s assumed that the ones who correctly predict something must be better at their job, when the truth is that they are just lucky.
Excellent idea! I never thought in applying statistical analysis to this thesis.
I am going to compile the list, and figure it out how to model the problem. I have already a hundred candidates to truly visionaries, from Seneca to Vernor Vinge.
There is a small problem, though. We can’t say everything writen by an author is a prediction. For instance, H.G. Wells wrote “The war of the worlds”, “The time machine”, “The invisible man” and many other stories that weren’t predictive at all, and that irritated Jules Verne! However, he also wrote “The world set free” in 1914, where he describes the atomic bombs. A novel that was read by Szilard and that inspired him to invent the chain reaction in 1939. Wells also predicted the tanks in his tale “Land ironclads”, a tale which inspired to British militaries to develop the actual tank.
So, how we measure Wells? 3 to 2? Or we just select those of his works where he really had a vision of the future at hand?
You make a list of everything in the author’s books that might be considered a prediction. You do this for many authors. You cut down the list of predictions for each author to those which could conceivably be true by the present day. (This is one of the problems in testing this and it may just screw up any chance that this test means anything. Some authors only write about the far future, and there’s no way of knowing if their predictions will be true or not.) Now take the list you have of true and false predictions for each author. This will be a list that goes like this:
You have to include a lot of authors whose predictions aren’t very good and not just the ones you think are good. If you only include authors whose predictions are good, in your view, it may show nothing except that some proportion of any authors’ predictions are true by accident.
Take this list to a statistician. Tell them to do a Chi Square Test on these numbers to see if the right predictions are randomly scattered among all the authors or if they are significantly biased to just a few of the authors.
Oh, I forgot to mention. You need to make this a double-blind test. Don’t compile the list of predictions in each author’s works yourself. Let someone else do it. You’re unconsciously biased toward certain authors and will unconsciously choose just the right predictions for those authors. Then take the list of predictions (with all the predictions for all the authors mixed up together) to a third person and ask them to evaluate which predictions have come true. If you do this yourself, you will unconsciously be biased toward saying that your favorite authors’ predictions are true.
With respect to predicting economic tendencies, that’s like predicting the winning number at the lotto… Just a matter of chance. I don’t see the relation at all.
Predicting future technologies is another matter. If you are well informed about the current technology, its limitations and the possibilities, predictions aren’t that hard at all.
For instance, I can predict that in a few years (or decades), everybody will wear glasses connected to Internet, that will allow you to talk with foreigners thanks to captions you will see in the glasses :D. That’s not so hard to do. By the way, that’s a prediction of Vernor Vinge, and I am sure this will happens in the near future.
I can also predict the population bust. It is so easy to do it. For a long time it has been known that people in the cities reproduce a lot less than people in the country side. From the demographic figures in the last decades you see most people is moving to the cities, and the population growth moderates when that happens. It is almost unavoidable that the population growth will stop and then turn backwards, even in places where today reproduction is high, like Africa. So, expect a population bust in the next 40 years.
Visions? Nope. It is only reading the signs with precision.
True enough, but putting a new spin on old tech is also a staple of the genre, at least in more modern sci-fi. For instance, The Diamond Age featured mechanical computers, like Babbage’s, except made at the molecular level and therefore far more powerful.
Perhaps a certain amount of time must pass for this to work. When The Diamond Age was published–or today for that matter–few people had/have experience with mechanical computing, so it seems more exotic than outdated. I couldn’t say if the same was true for crystals then.
Indeed.
I know most science fictions authors of the 20th century talked about robots, flying cars, and rockets that flew to the stars in a week. Others authors, like Phillip K. Dick, just mixed shamanism and fiction in theirs tales about telephaty and other myths. Robots never came, because they were just the myth of the Golem in metal coat. The flying cars have proven impractical, although there are still hope new VTOLs develop in the future that fullfill, partially, that dream.
With respect to space travel, most Sci Fi authors were too optimistic. Most of them, although not all.
However, even in “regular” authors some predictions came close. Heinlein, for instance, speaks about cell phones in Rocketship Gallileo. Yes, he didn’t predicted the trip to the moon with accuracy at all. However, he had a very interesting idea: he thought only atomic rockets could be practical for going to space, so his rockets were atomic.
He wasn’t so wrong in that. After the trips to the moon, the space race slowed down, and today it is really suspended. Space travel is too expensive and complicated with the contemporary chemical rockets! Heinlein new it all along, that something different was necesary to conquer space.
And we are still waiting for that different technology
In “Earthman, Come Home” by James Blish, published in 1953 (after the first semiconductors based on germanium had been invented), a briefly mentioned plot point is the economic dislocation caused by humanity going off the “germanium standard”.
Thanks. That’s interesting! And Blish was a great writer and thinker.
By the way, for the fans of the old predictions, here it is a classic: 1999 AD. A prediction from the sixties about the computers at home in the future.
Indeed, by 1940 anyone seriously interested in rocketry could calculate the expected performance of chemical rockets, and those that did so immediately came to the conclusion that they’d never be worth it. It would require multiple stages to loft a miserable payload fraction just into Earth orbit. (The Saturn V achieved 4%) Most science fiction writers presumed that manned spaceflight wouldn’t happen until advances in nuclear energy made a single-stage, ultra-high performance rockets available. The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and simular predictions in the '60s were over-optimistic and overlooked the expense, difficulty and risk of sending people to the Moon.
Yes. The limitations of chemical rockets are stopping space exploration. There are alternatives, but the technology required is decades, or centuries ahead of the present state of the art.
What are they?
(1) hypersonic planes. In development. Perhaps could be ready in some decades if there is money to finance the development.
(2) Laser propulsion. It works in small scale models. It needs hundred of billions and decades of development to become a practical idea. Perhaps one day.
(3) Space elevator. It needs a technology that today doesn’t exist: cables a hundred times more resistant than today’s stronger steel cables. When that cable is available, perhaps in some decades, someone has to figure it out how to build and deploy such huge structures, and then figure it out again how to finance it. Very unlikely to happen in the next century.
So, in few words, we are staying home, at least for now.
Isn’t an integrated circuit just a bunch of imbedded transistors? The first transistor was patented in 1925. I don’t see how anything past that could be predictive.
I think the problem with predictive science fiction is that science is years ahead of what the public thinks it is. I don’t think science fiction writers are thinking of anything at all.
The material exists in small quantities: Carbon nanofiber would be up to the task. All we need to do is figure out how to make it in significant quantities. And even without the space elevator application, people would still be working on how to do that, since it’d have tremendous applications (with corresponding tremendous profit potential) for everything from golf clubs to suspension bridges. So I’m pretty optimistic on that one.
Aside from everything else that video gets wrong, you have to consider slippery terminology. For example, that video assumes a ‘home computer’ is a single, large computer that is pretty much attached to the house and is concerned with helping in running the household, a kind of transistorized majordomo.
That never happened. No, you can’t convince me it did. Not even if you wave your arms enough to achieve flight.
Another little fillip from the film is the idea that circuits would need to be monitored constantly for failure and that an automated system of replacing damaged circuits would need to be employed. That’s a dead give-away this is from the pre-microchip era: Integrated circuits in use essentially never fail except under extreme conditions. (That is, their mean time between failure is much longer than their expected service lifetime, at least in home systems.) It’s a fine example of how advances in technology can make the overall system much simpler.
(They also never expected that a professional man would ever deign to learn how to type in order to send a letter. Men have pens and secretaries for such things.)
Anyway, my point is nobody can really predict the future in the sense you’re talking about. Expecting SF authors to be able to is an exercise in lying about what they actually said.
That’s basically it. Either the prediction doesn’t say how the thing works, like a flying car, or it gets it wrong when it does, like inertron (the reverse weight substance from Armageddon 2419 AD, the first Buck Rogers story).
Of course, predictions of the future are never fully precise. That’s not the idea. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be predictions but just magic.
I don’t expect SF writers predict the future. Most are very bad to predict what will happens next day. There are exceptions, though, and those exceptional writers are the ones I am interested in. For instance, the visions of the future of Vernor Vinge and Crichton
That’s interesting. I am only afraid the a space elevator will be a giant structure. The biggest ever built in the history of the world, and to finance that will be the main problem.
I could bet that laser propulsion could be a cheaper and more practical way to achieve the same goal: sending loads to space continuosly.