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The Terminal Experiment Q3: Tech Extrapolation
There's a lot of future tech in the book, some of which now feels rather science-fictional because things didn't happen the way he speculated, but some of it feels rather de rigeur now, because it did more or less happen that way. The book was written in 1995, around the time, maybe just before, the World Wide Web emerged, and certainly prior to smart phones. Did anything especially strike you as especially prescient? What about notable misses?
Comments
I thought the idea that so much stuff would be cloud-based, with local machines being essentially like prisons to the three virtual individuals, was surprisingly prescient. Most older SF writers continued to assume that computers would largely remain isolated rather than networked.
I suppose a big miss would be things like DNA-based storage, or the rise of cloud-based AI - for plot purposes he needed it to be human individuals who happened to reside in the cloud, rather than (for example) AI assistants or personas. The closest to the latter is, I suppose, the viruses that were crafted to try to kill off the copies.
I thought the idea of simply uploading 3 copies of human "consciousness" with very little regard for the actual storage space required and then having no concept of firewalling them off in any kind of effective way so that they would just wander off into the world was pretty hilarious.
Certainly leaned more to the fiction side of the SF spectrum.
I was surprised how many things he got rather right - Videophones (eg. Facetime) which he would hardly have been the first to predict. Carphones. But he didn't see smart phones.
At one point he mentions a maglev train from Toronto to Montreal. I laughed. On this year has the goverment announced funding a new high-speed rail project in that corridor - 30 years later.
The passwords are so simple in this book - he didn't foresee needing to have one capital, one number, and one special character!
Toward the end, an 'immortal' is mentioned - is this an android? And a weapon called a 'beamer' weapon is used - t's something that 'scrambles' things - like body parts.
Print of Demand Newspaper Boxes - way before print on demand books, but this technology seems to have bypassed corner boxes and went directly to your phone.
Net News Digest - not so different from Google News, right?
But for the ultimate in techs that went nowhere - see the last segment of that Prisoners of Gravity video I shared in the other thread - flying cars, a walking tv, and robo-jockeys. The 90s really was a long time ago!
Cloud Computing is just a fancy name for 'On Someone Else's Computer'... There was an internet when he wrote the book, but it slightly predates the Worldwide Web. I was an IT director at the time for a bleeding edge physics based startup, and we all used the internet all the time. We used isolated non-networked computers for A: isolating things we didn't want escaping, B: secret projects, and C: storing pristine copies of vital data for restoration. We called the use of these computers 'sneakernet'. I know exactly where he was coming from, and he was more on-target than most of those predicting computing trends back then! I would give him about a 10% success rate...
For everyone who's been wanting a flying car...
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/cars/news/flying-car-that-can-reach-over-155mph-in-the-air-could-come-to-market-in-2026/ar-AA1EYdhq
One minor drawback "However, AirCar 2 is not affordable with estimates set at $800,000 to $1million".
Ah well...
This is why it bothered me that the others were able to wander out into the wider world so easily. It would have been very simple to isolate them and yet they didn't. I get that it was a plot device but I didn't like it.
I think it was a kind of stand-in for "the humans concerned only thought of a few things but the virtual ones had plenty of time to work out their own agenda".
Mostly it felt out of date, in the sense that Sawyer, and everyone else at that time, hadn't really faced 1) Just how many people exercising agency there are in the world, and 2) The consequences for centralised intervention that the internet entailed. We're still having trouble with this. Of course, the internet was a lot smaller (orders of magnitude fewer servers) at that time as well.