Technology is catching up to Science Fiction

[wordranger]

Funny, when I started writing my novel a few years ago I came up with this neat little innovation… these kids on my futuristic planet don’t carry books around to school, they have Datapads. Imagine my surprise when the iPad became the “in thing” last year. I just laughed it off. It still fits in my story, and I don’t wave it around as an “innovation” but I found it amusing.

Today, on Circuitmart, there was an eight-minute video clip about “wearable robots”. The military has contracted for a firm in the USA to create wearable exoskeletons that will be able to read the wearer’s intent, and increase their strength by twenty times. Eventually, they speculate they may even be able to make people fly. (They do other cool stuff, but I don’t want to bore you if you’re not into tech-stuff)

Now, my first reaction was: This is a bad idea… haven’t they read Science Fiction stories? These things lead to no good! One of the companies mentioned was even named Cyberdine. (Very funny in a ‘spooky sort of way’ for all you Terminator fans out there)

Anyway, it made me think… for those of us who are Science Fiction authors, we need to really start reaching into the depths of our imagination as far as technology goes. It was a lot easier to write in the 50’s when a simple computer was a dream someone had. Now, all our dreams and wildest fantasies are becoming reality.

We are going to have to work harder to spark the interests of our readers. Yes, you can say “go for the story… the story will drive them in!” Well, yes, that’s a given, but in Sci-Fi, I think readers look for a little something “different”.

Story is always a given, but to make our worlds seem “futuristic” we are going to have to start working harder… and faster. You might just come up with something cool, and someone will come up behind you and actually invent and market the darned thing before you even get published!

If you are into “tech stuff” you can watch the video about the robotic armor at the link below.
(Circuitsmart makes you watch a 30-second commercial, first, and the video will start afterwards)

http://www.circuitmart.com/mart/49531.shtml

[polymath]

I came up in those heady years when the future was all the rage. We still don't have flying cars. Everything else has pretty much come to fruition. Flying cars, there's issues to be resolved. Noise problems and an inconvenient FAA policy requiring fly by wire automation in the event of operator failure to fly safely.

The Twentieth century was an awe-inspiring age. Technology lept ahead quicker than ever before. I feel humanity's playing catch-up and has for about two decades, innovation creativity, science, society, culture, and technology-wise.

I've got some new creative innovations waiting in the wings for when I have the chops to debut them. One hint, the tardyon, luxon, and tachyon realms are not all there is to the time-space continuum. Meet the fractyon and luton realms. And an assortment of misms, one, the cyanism species. Cybernetic analog misms. Corporeal creatures realized from exotic time and space and energy-mass dimensional intersections.

[Sanderling]

It seems to me that the more technologically advanced we become, the faster our technological development is. At 31 I'm not that old. And yet, there's so much of today's technology that we didn't even have when I was a teenager, nevermind when I was born. The internet as we know it today was only beginning to take formation when I was in high school; I was among the first of my friends to sign up for an email address, and I had to sign up my high school boyfriend for his just so I could send him things. A high school friend of mine was the only person I knew with a mobile phone, and it was a huge, clunky thing resembling a household handset and base that sat in the center console of his family's car. Your options for in-store payment were either cash or credit; debit/Interac didn't exist until my grade 9 year (and nobody shopped online).

(Edit to add - or digital cameras! I got my first one halfway through university, when they were still something of a novelty and 1.3 megapixels was about average. Now you're hard-pressed to buy film anymore and I don't know a single person who still uses it.)

I feel like we've made more advances in the last 15 years than happened in the 15-year span covering the same period of my parents' lives. And it's a positive feedback loop - the more we learn, the farther we can leap, the faster our innovation.

That said, as polymath points out there's still lots that can be done. We're still a long ways from either Star Trek or Star Wars. There's still lots of room for imagination in both large-scale advances (flying or self-piloted cars, particle transporters, space travel, habitations on other planets) and smaller ones (interactive androids like Data, mind-reading machines, regenerated limbs, Ironman-style personal propulsion).

What I'd personally really like is a camera implant that's controlled by your brain and will capture an image of whatever you're looking at just by thinking the command. So that when you just get a fleeting glimpse of something you can snap a photo and then examine that photo to actually be able to see what you saw.

[JustAnotherJen]

I smiled when I read this post because it brought back a simple memory from a few weeks ago: My husband and I went to the movies and sat in the very back row of the stadium seating. And in the time before the movie started we just watched everyone around us with all the glowing screens in front of them. It was pretty funny because there were very few people in the theater without any glowing screen at all (mostly phones, a few tablets), and with the dimmed theater lights, it just looked like something out of a sci-fi movie. Only we're living it! It felt a little surreal. Maybe I'm not explaining this very well, but you could always try seeing for yourself. I'm assuming you'd get the same results in just about any movie theater. And, being like Sanderling, I'm right at that age where I can still remember when technology was just barely starting it's boom. It's weird to compare then and now when "then' wasn't so very long ago.

I am always amazed at how quickly technology leaps forward. Especially lately! And while I'm not a sci-fi writer, I have a lot of respect for those of you that can keep coming up with new ideas to satisfy the cravings of the readers. You certainly have your work cut out for you in a way writers 50 years ago (or even 20 years ago) didn't. I am definitely curious to see what the next "generation" of sci-fi writers invents!

[longknife]

I read a comment on another forum about some young person reading Kurt Vonnegut for the first time. I grew up in the days when Heinlein, Asimov, Anderson and many others were talking about things nobody believed to be possible. Heck! Look at good old Jules Verne in the late 1800s talking about atomic submarines.

Make you wonder where they guys came up with their dreams and ideas.

[polymath]

Jules Verne had the technological marvels of his time to draw from. Robert Fulton's seminal Nautilus submarine and ongoing global electricity experiments. However, he didn't write an atomic powered submarine. It was powered by battery piles recharged from a coal burning powerplant at his Nautilus' headquarters. The novel, though, was a political statement. Many of the popularized English translations leave out the boring political bits. His French publishers excised portions of Vernes' original political rhetoric as well.

For that matter, H.G. Wells' The Time Machine is a political statement too. One central theme is how runaway technology dooms humanity, a going concern at the time due to exuberant scientific advancements post-Mendeleev. Time travel motifs had been around before Wells' novel, though not some say as artfully used as by Wells. The artfulness of its inspiration to me comes from asking a what if. What if we could see the future as surely as history records the past? A step further, what about physically traveling across time? The art there is how actually reporting from the immediate times, places, and situations of the settings closes narrative distance much more closely than just plain old clearly reciting the political message. Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it in ever more escalating horror because technology escalates destruction effectiveness. Doomsayer, Wells was.

[AnimaDictio]

I agree that old science fiction isn't as fiction-y anymore, but I don't think it's any harder today to come up with advanced technology that feels whiz-bang fiction-y. Consider how every single one of our institutions - marriage, school, government, religion - will change when artificial intelligence becomes sufficiently smart. Think of all the ways information will be at our finger tips when the Internet becomes less of a place to which we go, and more like an aspect of every device.

What if my bed spoke to my client's car as she drove to my home office for an appointment and the car said she was late and the bed rescheduled the appointment because it was monitoring my bio rhythms and realized I needed more sleep and the car told the client to go get some coffee, because we're rescheduled for tomorrow? What if my priest were a robot who knew scripture so well and knew my heart so well that he could quote just the right scripture or sermonette to encourage me and give me strength for the day? That's futuristic to me.

[JohnDurvin]

Technology increases on an upward curve, and it's hard to predict how quickly things will develop. Fun fact: the hard drive of the original Starship Enterprise contained what was then a ludicrous amount of memory: four gigabytes.
Incidentally, I've seen a few videos of these wearable robots, and the creepiest one has a project foreman telling the camera how now that version two of the suit is done, he can't wait for version three...while version two is in the background moving around with nobody in it. They never mentioned them being able to do that in the video.
But as for everyday tech, I think we can all see where we'll be in a decade or so; smart-phones will absorb (or should I say "assimilate") GPS systems, Wii controllers, 3-D game systems, and probably that technology that's come out in the form of test-your-will games that read your mind (like that "Star Wars" one where you guide a little ball around using the Force). The only bit of indecision is whether or not the in-development Google Goggles catch on. How will this affect society? Well, we're going to be barraged with ads and all the information in the world, and as dependent as people already are on cel-phones and smart phones, a lot of people are going to be helpless without them. It's actually the subject for my next book--Americans addicted to "super-genius" phones start de-evolving into a high-adrenaline cross between kindergarten and "Jackass", and most people make their living off making viral videos.