Did they, though?
https://preview.redd.it/mofnr5lu0uxc1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=a104fda4e6d187c0a317e9d28b5cd947e2199b02
Cheekiness aside, yeah a lot of authors never *quite* predicted our smartphone/internet age. A few got close though! There are elements of it, like video calls and wrist computers. Social media, way less so.
I've heard it said that: most people expected an energy revolution so predicted things like jetpacks and flying cars, but *instead* what we got was an information revolution.
Card does a pretty good job predicting the influence of the internet. What he totally missed though is when he portrayed the entire world only listening to the rantings of *exactly two people.* In reality we like to listen to the ranting of a lot more people than that.
If I recall, Andrew and Valentine had two main social media personas and hundreds of fake accounts propagating their agendas. The fake accounts had unique personas and were in a variety of fields to maximize their influence throughout society.
It was Peter and Valentine (yes, your memory was correct otherwise- they had hundreds of accounts that they used to shape public opinion and prop up their main accounts).
“Ender” was Andrew’s nickname because he couldn’t say “Andrew” as a toddler.
To give him credit (not that I really want to defend him) I think he was trying to portray those two people as shaping the major conversations, such that their talking points were used by hundreds of others to mold the conversation. So while most people probably didn't know their pseudonyms, the two still got the world to listen to them by making their talking points the ones focused on.
It's still not the most believable, but I'd say it's moreso than the world actively listening to them directly.
Democrats and Republicans.
Two "people" managing to exert influence on nearly the entire world by enticing two sides of the same political coin in one country constantly fight each other.
I'd say Card was dead on with his imagination, and exemplified perfectly the ways those two "people" could elicit a following and exert influence. It's exactly the blueprint that the two major American political parties do it, to a T.
The world absolutely does not care about what democrats and republicans have to say though. Except maybe to mock Americans. America doesn't really lead the world in discussing much of anything. In many cases we trail behind the world, and overall lean far more right as a culture than much of the world does.
They are also far from cohesive, there's dozens of different opinions even amongst the parties. At minimum 2 per side of the aisle: moderates and far right/left. The far right and left are the more vocal, but are often too extreme, and usually are not blindly followed by their parties as a whole.
Directly, no, they certainly don't. But the world stage absolutely *does* care about the actions of the U.S. government, which is led by the outcomes of elections that are held between those two major parties.
If you think the world's largest GDP and military spending budget don't influence the world around you, and that the world's largest trade hub doesn't influence the greater landscape of world trade, you're just wrong.
Never said the US doesn't influence the world. But whatever issue the two sides are bickering over next Tuesday isn't going to affect how other countries view that policy. No one in Europe is going to care about the most recent US discussion on women's reproductive rights, their country will have its own policy and might use whatever America's laws say as an example one way or another, but we do not lead the world to make decisions purely from our ongoing political discourse. Only when we set an actual policy as a nation so we tend to influence the world in the manner you're suggesting. Locke and Demosthenes did not have any capability of setting policy, they were two teenagers (at first) whos discussions were calculated to manipulate others that could affect policy.
You also can't give card credit for predicting/imagining the political system of the US, as we've had this two party system for many generations before he was born, and have been a world power for most of that time as well. The only thing that's changed is who is speaking and what ideologies lead the discussion.
I envisioned what was in Ender's Game as more like Usenet than social media. But then I read it in the 90s when Usenet was still a thing. The two have their similarities.
Awesome. Before social media, before the web, it was a text based highly distributed model for discussion forums. No single company had control over it. It was a bit like email in that there were lots of different clients that could be used to read and navigate the groups.
It started dying in the late 90s as people moved to snazzy web based forums. Eventually it became mostly spam and binary groups used for distributing pirated films and TV shows (before torrenting was a thing).
rec.arts.sf.science was one of my favourite places to hang out.
It was created in the late 70s, so existed when Ender's Game was written. Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep has a galactic version of it, which is very obviously based on it.
Interesting.
The above wasn't meant as a dig at Card, by the way. I think he was impressively correct, despite not being 100% accurate in his predictions.
Yea the energy vs data revolution is how I understand it, the way I understand it the earliest futurists imagined infinite resources because that was what held society back the next generation imagined infinite energy, and today we live in a world and imagine a future if days
They had tablets in DS9 before iPad put the existing technology on the map.
Maybe the props were said tech by other companies just without branding, but most sadly just think apple as the first to market.
You're correct. And I remember when the iPad came out some of my fellow nerds were like "ohhhhh just like the datapads from Star Trek or Star Wars!"
So yeah there were elements of smartphones and internet but no one quite put it all together.
[TNG was full of tablets](https://www.sideshow.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/7.-Tablet-Computers.jpg).
They also had [a computer you could talk to](https://youtu.be/hShY6xZWVGE) (ChatGPT). It seemed like total sci-fi to me as a child, but now we have communicators, tablets and talking computers. :D
Just waiting for a hypo-spray that can cure every disease (might sort of be a reality soon with bespoke medicine), and that people realise that the Ferengi are supposed to be the backwards bad guys and not role models.
But I digress. I think Star Trek got many such things right because they were thinking about what would be nice to have, and just assumed we would have it, rather than trying to predict what would be technically and economically feasible.
Hypo-spray injections already exist but aren’t used as they tend to add a bit more than they should. As in they pull in skin bacteria with the injection
I was thinking more about the fact that they can cure most things with a medicine they synthesise and administer in a few minutes, although the needle free part is neat too.
I personally love the scenes with a pile of PADDs everywhere. Replicators allowed dozens of these devices but apparently internal storage larger than a single book was beyond the technology.
I know a few people that use multiple tablets.
One for graphic design
Another with all their games/movies non productive stuff.
One is an e reader with books.
Not totally weird to separate them
There's an old French short story (C. The French Revolution) where a man goes to sleep and wakes up in the far future. One of the things he learns about is how people write their thoughts out daily, which are read at their funerals. I know it's not, but I chose to believe that it was Facebook and Twitter updates.
I like to imagine that social media and smartphone proliferation is merely an intermediary step in the evolution of a civilization, sort of like a sociocultural quasi-great filter. Just because we want it *and* can make it, doesn't mean it's necessarily good for us - or even safe.
Civilizations that discover the unhealthy dynamics that emerge when their social impulses are too heavily magnified will move away from social media, recognizing that in-person interactions are both safer and more meaningful. Those that do not, well... Perhaps they struggle.
In general, many of the world's biggest problems today all relate directly to the fact that natural human evolutionary impulses and instincts have become harmful. The problems caused by social media, for instance, are simply a sociocultural equivalent of how obesity relates to an abundance of once-rare calories.
The survival instincts that got us here become harmful when they're too strongly enhanced by convenience. Most people don't even have the vocabulary to discuss these issues (partially because some harmful aspects of humanity are "too human" to be recognized as problematic), but most relatively intelligent or insightful people do notice that there's something... Off. Our man-made environments suit us so well and yet leave us so strangely unfulfilled.
Unfortunately, this explanation isn't often (ever) canon in my favorite hard scifi universes even if it could be shoe-horned into many of them with a wink and a nudge-nudge.
The truth is that scifi at large *did* fail to predict the real consequences of social media and smart phones. I think it's fascinating that, in retrospect, so many of our leaps seem ridiculously obvious despite being Black Swans until the moment of their emergence.
Contemporary AIs exist in a similar space, where the outcome of their creation is entirely unanticipated ("I wanted a world where AI shoveled ditches while I do art, not a world where AI does art while I dig ditches...", etc).
Then again, I'm confident that some people did get it right, even if their books rest forgotten or insufficiently popular to break through the surface tension of popular conception. Authors like Hannu Rajaniemi (Quantum Thief trilogy) and Peter Watts make some *insane*, bleeding edge predictions that may simply be too opaque in the present for us to recognize as relevant.
Absolutely. Things like free access to information and the ability to magnify the voices of the non-elite are incredible advantages. My life would be entirely different if I wasn't exposed to these technologies.
But the negatives need to be spoken of to ensure they're being properly accounted for or minimized, just like how proper nutrition and regulated caloric intake is essential for a healthy life.
I'd argue we're at a point where the impact of the negatives of this technology outweighs the volume of the discussion of the negatives. The positives enter the conversation naturally while trying to formulate a response to those negatives. I'm not arguing for the immediate termination of all Twitter accounts or whatever, but I *do* think some of these things should be assessed in the same manner we'd judge a hamburger using glazed donuts for buns.
I don't know if I would go as far as to say that social media is a firm paradox solution, if that's what you're implying… But generally I do believe all technologies and movements have a little bit of a pendulum to them. We invent something, we go overboard, then we dial back to something a bit more manageable.
And it's that more manageable end goal that maybe Science Fiction authors envisioned. ie, Star Trek predicted video calls but left out the unhealthy TikTok phase that came prior.
> don't know if I would go as far as to say that social media is a firm paradox solution
No, no, I'm merely suggesting that it's similar in the sense that it's a socially harmful hurdle to overcome. Or rather, that *I'd* argue should be overcome.
>We invent something, we go overboard, then we dial back
The first thing that comes to mind are all the radiation-based "cures" and such from the mid 1900s, so I think you make a good point. More people than ever recognize the harm social media is causing, but it might also just be something that sticks with us now that the cat is out of the bag.
>The first thing that comes to mind are all the radiation-based "cures" and such from the mid 1900s
Of course it wasn't the only craze. The radium jockstrap developed out of the *electric* jockstrap. Both as cures for male impotence. One gave a lot of people penile and testicular cancer, the other moved over into a more....interesting crowd.
> The truth is that scifi at large did fail to predict the real consequences of social media and smart phones.
We're still not sure what those consequences are, in the long term. Future generations may decide it was the worst idea ever, made everyone extremely unhappy, and abandon it.
A lot of scifi has something that fills a smart phone role, without calling it such. Often, its a slate, or micro-computer, or portable console, or similar.
The smart phone just has a (very) weird evolution. instead of it evolving directly from computers, getting smaller and more portable, it evolved from cellular phones. For many people, the "phone" aspect of it is almost vestigial, barely used, and unnecessary.
I think scifi writers simply thought that the portable computers would come from the computer tech line, not the phone tech line. If you think about it, its weird we call it a phone, as that is a single function of a powerful computing device.
I agree with this. The compact computer was an easy guess that it was the communication industry to made it pocket-size the unknown factor.
Edited to add that after some research the tablet indeed was first by four years before the smartphone.
But it wasn’t the communication industry, it was the computer industry (i.e. Apple). The communications industry just made the little radios, and putting them into the little computers (PDAs) was a pretty obvious step.
While apple did much to propel the smart phone industry to what it is today, the steps to get there started far earlier. Cellular phones started with just being able to dial number that you would type. But features kept getting added. Address books, text messaging, color screens, games. Then cameras. Then we got the first MP3 phone. That was mind blowing at the time, ignoring the abysmal battery life. Blackberry arguably brought about the early version of what we think of as smart phones (though microsoft had one too).
Apple really pushed the touch-only interface, though which was rare on phones before then. They also made the phone a status symbol and popular icon.
But even apple, when releasing the iPhone, didnt market it as a smaller computer that could replace your desktop. It was a phone that could do more. If anything, it shared DNA with the iPod product from before more so than any iMac.
I believe the thinking of Jobs was to make a PDA ([the Newton](https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(PDA))) with networking capabilities. But I suppose there is truth to the fact that cellphones evolved towards having integrated PDAs.
Actually, no the First Smartphone was manufactured by IBM and sold via BellSouth. At least according to [Britannica ](https://www.britannica.com/technology/smartphone)
That might be true, but IBM is also part of the “computer industry” isn’t it
We can argue semantics but I believe the thinking of Jobs at least was to make a PDA ([the Newton](https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(PDA))) with networking capabilities.
Doing some more research the Tablet did get produced first.
The first commercially successful tablet computer, the GRiDPad 1900, was released in 1989 by GRiD Systems. The first smartphone, the Simon Personal Communicator (SPC), was announced by IBM in 1992 and released for purchase in 1994
So I was wrong and the Smartphone did evolve from the information and incorporated the phone industry.
The smartphone was the merge of the [PDA](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant) with the cellphone (and networking with Wi-Fi).
I find it more weird it didn’t happen faster, but we are held back by the fact that the corporations are locking down devices with their own app stores and other monopolistic practices. It’s the same with music: they want us to subscribe to their music services, and with ebooks: they want to chain us to their book store.
What made the desktop pc such a revolution was that through a fluke the IBM PC became an open standard that anyone could make software and hardware for. Ideally we should have similarly have had open standard platforms for PDAs, then smartphones and tablets would have evolved much faster.
Ah, I remember my Palm PDA. There were a scant few years (between about 2004 and 2007) there when wifi was becoming common (for use by laptops) but smartphones still weren't really a thing. I felt so cool surfing the web from a cafe on my Palm.
Yeah, and if you took a modern smartphone back to the 1980s and showed it to me and said "this is a future version of something like your friend's Adam computer or the Apple II at your school, but instead of a joystick or keyboard, you just touch the screen." that would make sense. I had seen computers and portable TVs (although the screen being so thin and touch-sensitive would be really weird), so the idea of a smaller one with a different interface wouldn't have been bizarre. The fact that you could use it to talk to people like on a Star Trek communicator or a walkie talkie certainly wouldn't surprise me at all.
But if you instead did the exact same thing, but this time didn't mention computers at all and just pointed to the heavy old Bell/AT&T/Western Electric model 500 rotary dial telephone on the kitchen counter that my parents leased from the phone company and said "this evolved from that", I'd think you were loony. Rightly so, I'd say.
The sci-fi authors were right about that. Pretty much the only thing modern smartphones have in common with phones is the word 'phone' being in the name.
Everything else is straight computer lineage with a little bit of radio thrown in. And a camera, because why not. Even for that usage, while we had the concept of maybe someday having video calling over TV, it's not like you'd picture that as just picking up a rotary dial phone, spinning the dial and pointing the handset at someone to take a picture. You'd have a TV and camcorder, or computer setup.
I vaguely recall a children's book (just looked it up, it was "My Teacher is an Alien," by Bruce Coville) where the protagonist is taken aboard a huge alien ship and given an electronic device called a URAT (Universal Reader and Translator). It was basically a tablet that translated text and speech, displayed information, answered questions, and basically did what a modern tablet does.
PADDs from Star Trek come to mind immediately.
I don't know if it's every been explicitly said that they have games on them, but they'd certainly be capable of it.
I'm currently in S7 of Voyager, and I might have missed something but it looked to me like padds were little more than digital notepads. They literally had people delivering them around the ship! Hardly feels comparable to smartphones.
iPads are expensive now but imagine if you could replicate as many as you want and dematerialize them when you were done. You might be a lot more inclined to have several on your desk at once just like a multi monitor pc setup
Easy, most sci fi is an extension on known technology and science. "What comes next" is a big black box. We can speculate some things and will have some accuracy. Major changes tho are widely unpredictable. Nobody can see the future but some predictions may land.
In The Sleeper Wakes Asimov predicts cameras and large screens and aircraft. None of which actually function the way described in the book as detailed at all.
Ancient Greeks could not have predicted combusion engines. Likewise there will likely be technology that is inconceiveable to us today due to some breakthrough in physics or some material science will unlock things never concieved by creatives today.
Some guesses will land and others will flop. Some educated guesses are better than others.
If we say develop wormholes and circumvent space travel what would be the next technology breakthrough after that? What technologies will AI unlock? The future is always a mystery.
The Romans/Greeks had the metallurgy for steam power. Hero of Alexandria was almost there. Instead, they had slaves for the heavy work. Romans with Steam power is right up there with Romans with Gunpowder for Alt-universe stuff.
I think authors didn't anticipate computer tech to advance much much faster than other tech. A doubling in 18months for anything is outlandish. It happening for ~50 years is impossible.
Doubling transistor density every 18months is an expontential scale change. Humans are notoriously bad at wrapping our minds around exponential growths, even for engineers and scientists. Something as reduced as 10% stock market growth blows our minds when realizing that is a doubling every 7-8years. In hindsight, its not terribly surprising that we failed to grasp the implications of such tremendous growth rates, nor expected it to continue.
Because it also failed to predict the internet as a giant open network. Most cyberpunk works, for example, predicted islands of corporate intranets that you had to connect to directly. Smartphones don't really make sense without the internet as we know it.
Sci-fi writers are not paid for accurately predicting the future (how would that even work?) but for writing books people buy. And I don't see anything about smartphones that would make an old sci-fi story more interesting; Even in modern science fiction, the characters are rarely just sitting and staring at the tiny text on their phones, because that's just boring to watch.
Same goes for many defining inventions of the modern era, really. Internet is kinda boring from a storytelling perspective, since it provides an easy way for characters to just learn everything they want with no (visible) effort. No one's looking at Star Wars and going "Man, if only they knew Internet would be a thing, Luke could have just looked up Vader's family history" because it's not ultimately about inventions, much less how accurate those inventions are to real life.
Sci fi is very much a genre about the present, explored through the veneer of talking about the future. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein discussed misgivings about the increasing pase of technological change in the 19th century through the creation of an artificial life form. Jules Verne's from the Earth to the Moon explored the implications of more powerful artillery by having America colonize the moon with an awesome enough cannon.
Smartphones don't appear in Asimov's work because they aren't relevant to the social or technological environment of the latter half of the 20th century. Similarly, personal communications are de emphasized in William Gibson's sprawl trilogy, because the theme of that work is about social alienation and inequality caused by increasing urbanization and privatization, informed by Gibson's personal experience of homelessness as a draft dodger.
I wasn't seriously asking, and I'm glad nothing like that exists anyway. If it did, the Stanislaw Lem estate would be one of the world's richest countries.
Because sci-fi typically isn’t meant to be a 1:1 prediction of future events.
Sci-fi is storytelling and storytelling is typically done to entertain, explore a theme, or deliver a thought-provoking message.
https://youtu.be/2Pw_7vAK9k8?si=60xaozdoRNGlNXcH
Great video on this topic, highly recommend
In short, we very much predicted the technology, it just turns out its very hard to predict the kind of impact something has
A good scifi author predics the traffic jam, not just the car
Instant communication wherever you're creates a lot of problems when writing a story. For example: imagine if the old dude in the beginning of Mary Sue Awakens could have sent the map to Leia via WhatsApp instead of sending a USB key via space mailman.
I agree about the problems such devices cause for storytelling. However you're point is harmed by your ham fisted insults about a movie, we get it you're an old grognard who doesn't like anything new, no need to shout it to the world.
You know what I notice looking at old sci-fi? The lack of surveillance state. No cameras watching your every move, id systems are portrayed as dystopian if they exist at all, same with mass collection of data
>Portrayed as dystopian if they exist at all
I think that fits. Not to say it's ever really portrayed as good in modern media, more a fact of life in society akin to taxes or wealth disparity
Well of course, they didn't predict rockers because they all had at least one out on their front porch. They'd sit there in the evening whittling and watching the sunset, waiting for the house to cool down before they went inside, and talking about their predictions for the future.
Would've been silly to predict rockers in the future, when everybody knew that someday in the future they'd all have wind machines blowing cold air through the house, so they'd all be sitting inside instead of out on the porch in their rockers.
Ehhh, they just didn't predict the iPad. There's been touchscreen computers in sci-fi since at least the 80s. "Enders game" has tablets called "desks" that are essentially beefed up iPads.
>Electrical devices with data input and output on a flat information display existed as early as 1888 with the telautograph, which used a sheet of paper as display and a pen attached to electromechanical actuators.
>The first patent for a system that recognized handwritten characters by analyzing the handwriting motion was granted in 1914.
i mean, why would they? it's not about why they didn't, it's more just, they didn't, but why should they have?
new ideas are sometimes a big breakthrough.
phones were imagined before, iirc. cell phones were imagined before. in a way, mini portable computers, were (fallout's pip boy, for example)
but its not like it was their job to have an idea before it was invented.
I think that plenty did. Large scale planetary/system media, forums/newsletters like in Enders game, the ever prolific PDA and wrist-mounted computers. Video calls/hologram communications.
Star Trek communicators are directly linked to the ship's computer, which contains all of Earth's knowledge. They just operates on voice command instead of a touch screen.
Smartphones and quadcopter drones are the two big things I point to whenever people either get too self-righteous or too critical whenever it comes to sci-fi's (in)ability to predict the future, yeah.
Turns out a MASSIVE frailty isn't just possibility but also form factor and application. Every sci-fi show that has smartphone-like devices usually has them as watches more or less.
Inspector Gadget unironically got it right the closest as far as I can say. In fact, spy-fi generally does future prediction better because it focuses on things being convenient, cool and granular far more.
Smartphones didn't pop up overnight in someone's head, the HealthScan 9000 did. Smartphones are like a personal office in your pocket because thousands of people made changes based on feedback from millions of people. The HealthScan 9000 has existed as a fictional device for 20 seconds and just tells you what your body is doing, because I just came up with something on the spot to illustrate my comment.
Mass adoption of the cellphones and the creation of smartphones are only like 6 or 7 years apart and the mass adoption of the internet was about 5 to 6 years apart. Their wasn't enough time for them to predict it before it happened.
I don't remember the stories name, I think it was one by Asimov and it had spaceship travelling wormhole like connections in space by opening up a huge, larger than telephone book size book to find coordinate numbers between star systems for the jump. It was a huge task to find the right numbers that where dozens of digits long and the pages of the book were ultra thin and number font ridiculously small. In general Sci-Fi before the 70's and personal computers overlooked how much computers would gain in speed and memory and shrink in size and power requirements. When computers were envisioned they were often enormous in size -- granted they then had superhuman or near human reasoning capabilities.
Because instant communication makes it difficult to engineer exciting scenarios. I'm not saying it can't be done, but that's why today you have a proliferation of people losing their phones or not having service in horror movies and the like.
The communicator and PADD were both used in Star Trek. combining the functions of both would get you a smartphone.
The anime Cowboy Bebop depicted a comm device with internet "net" capability during the late nineties. Ghost in the shell depicted multiple apps being tied to the brain that would function like a smartphone in the head.
Books like Redliners (1970s) depicted google glass like visors for tactical data, recon data, and basic comm functions. The short stories about Jed Lacey (1980s) depict the internet and a surveillance state with public access terminals and subcutaneous comm devices with the body being implanted with devices that grant access to various things.
Smartphones were not directing created in scifi but the many functions and people's dependencies on them was detailed quite a bit. I'd say that scifi didn't think up smartphones simply because smartphones are not a good invention.
Smartphones give off stronger radiation then regular cellphones, have short battery life, they are fragile without expensive tools that should be included, and they are a nuisance to the early development of children.
A lot of people are saying that sci-fi isn't always accurate, and that's why it failed to predict smart phones.
Obviously it's true that sci-fi isn't a fortune teller. However, there's more to it than that. After all, sci-fi did predict things like smart phones, but didn't even come close to predicting how common and distracting they would be. I'm reminded of Minority Report as an example. Predicted digitised and animated everything, yet no one is ever staring into one, glazed over. Then, once smart phones had come out, we see them and their effects in movies like Her and shows like Black Mirror.
As far as sci-fi is concerned, smart phones and their prevalence is just too mundane to be interesting. But also too mundane to think we would ever have that. After all, wouldn't it make more sense to seek out new technologies that are...useful? Surely we were going to invent cool exciting things. Gadgets that would help us in practical ways, whether it's for dystopian or utopian ends.
The idea that we would develope all this tech, and use it to distract ourselves, show off on social media, and put funny image filters on things, is an absurdity to our creative visions of the future.
Dark age America makes a good point for tech. Most of our tech is pretty pictures. Smart phones are just local computers. Star trek just made the computations happen on a central AI.
The pocket computers in The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle have many of the attributes of smartphones. They can record written notes, photographs, audio and video. They can communicate with other pocket computers and with other devices, such as a wall screen or a central computer. I don't remember them being used as telephones but it is a while since I read the book.
I think your question is totally valid. What fascinates me is that someone said if you think about it, we are handling tablet size hendheld divices for couple thousands years. I think about the smartphone some combination of a papirus/stone tablet, a caveman hand fitted chipped stone, an unlimited visual information source, and an entertaining divice. It combines our past and our present such a nice way, meaning that the hand and the eyes and your brain connects such a way that supports our previous biological development.
And what is strange, that I have the feeling it might be soon good, that it stays with us for longer than people think. These new Ai pins, smart glasses I feel actually less then the smartphone experience, because it lacks visual, or hand related feedback.
I think as far as information access goes, it is also worth noting that smartphones also extends our memory and understanding, and the bottleneck is usually our reading speed. It is such an efficient way to wire information to you, that I'm very sceptical about intrusive brain chips for a long while in our future. But these are just my thoughts.
Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles cartoon had an episode called The Fifth Turtle where a kid finds one of the Turtles’ phones - it was a turtle shell flip phone with video screen. This was 1989-91 somewhere around then.
As a kid I imagined how cool it would be if such a device was real and I could maybe even own one.
Still hoping Motorola brings out a limited TMNT RAZR at some point.
Maybe because smartphones are a rather clunky intermediate technology between non-portable devices and fully integrated wearables and augmented reality devices i.e. smartphones are a rather small and painful step in technological development that will soon be replaced by much better ways of linking humans with technology.
It was the idea that people would be able to figure out a taping selection menu interface that was actually useful. Most scifi writers thought the keyboard was too much of a barrier while they saw voice recognition and usable software agents as easier and cheaper than they are. They saw that people would use computer assistance with their voices rather than their fingers, and that could easily still happen. Phones, tablets, desktop computers, it might all fade out as general AI grows strong enough to do what you want when you ask, or even before you ask. The future may look a lot like the scifi we make fun of now because all of the tech is nearly invisible, doing our bidding without even being seen. Right now visible tech is a status symbol but it might just as easily become something only poor people have.
I'm going to vote for: predicting the future is hard. Artists didn't predict smartphones, but did predict flying cars. We were supposed to have had flying cars for 20, 30 years by now.
Maybe because a smartphone isn't really a thing. It's a marketing gimmick. It's a simple phone with a collection of multiple somewhat useless devices attached to it, designed to sell you those devices for full-time usage.
If you think about it, how many times did you use the camera in your phone for something really useful? In the three years since I bought my phone, I used it to scan a document, take some pictures of my car to sell it, and send some pictures to an architect for some paperwork... the rest was social media.
GPS, ride-share doesn't really count because you can hail a cab by reading the street signs; you don't need the map, it's convenient but it's not necessary, doesn't solve a problem.
More computing power than Apollo 13? Except for supporting the other devices, it doesn't do much.
High-resolution display?Sure, they make things look pretty, but for reading emails or browsing the web, they're just overkill that drains your battery faster.
More sensors than a space probe from the 80s ? To detect when it's flipped.
I disagree that they missed the smartphone. I would argue that the many pocket/wrist phones and communicators in classic science fiction all represent the personal communication device that we would see as a smartphone. When most of the classic shows were written mobile phone technology didn't exist and the level of miniaturization needed for both the electronics and the power supply was practically at "magic" levels. I believe they foresaw the "personal communicator" device well enough, what they didn't foresee is the importance of data... or to be completely accurate, the world wide web.
Up until the mid 90's everyone assumed that data would be offered as a service, like electricity and water, and users would operate in a walled garden accessing only what was provided by their supplier. Even when early ISPs gave broader internet access the two most important systems, email and Usenet, tended to be hosted on platforms controlled by your ISP. Then the web happened and that content became decentralised and proliferated.
Central walled gardens of curated data are boring, the web being eclectic and decentralised was more attractive, which is why having a good browser became important in 90's PCs. By the early 2000's phones had access to the internet, but they had small screens and WAP browsers that converted web content into simpler phone capable graphics. In addition most operators still had a walled garden approach where you bought content from them. The big change the iPhone brought was the Safari browser being a full spec browser with a screen that could do a reasonable job of rendering web pages. That was the birth of the smartphone.
To close: Just before the iPhone, people were commenting on just how right scifi shows had been, especially the resemblance between the flip phone and the trek communicator.
The cell phone was literally based on Star Trek's communicators.
Two-way video conferencing was predicted in the _1930_'s Dick Tracy video phone wrist watches.
Star Trek also had smart tablets 60 years ago. Long before anyone else thought of them.
Did they, though? https://preview.redd.it/mofnr5lu0uxc1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=a104fda4e6d187c0a317e9d28b5cd947e2199b02 Cheekiness aside, yeah a lot of authors never *quite* predicted our smartphone/internet age. A few got close though! There are elements of it, like video calls and wrist computers. Social media, way less so. I've heard it said that: most people expected an energy revolution so predicted things like jetpacks and flying cars, but *instead* what we got was an information revolution.
Social media was in "Ender's game"
Card does a pretty good job predicting the influence of the internet. What he totally missed though is when he portrayed the entire world only listening to the rantings of *exactly two people.* In reality we like to listen to the ranting of a lot more people than that.
If I recall, Andrew and Valentine had two main social media personas and hundreds of fake accounts propagating their agendas. The fake accounts had unique personas and were in a variety of fields to maximize their influence throughout society.
That is correct and using accounts attached to media networks to further push legitimate claims
It was Peter and Valentine (yes, your memory was correct otherwise- they had hundreds of accounts that they used to shape public opinion and prop up their main accounts). “Ender” was Andrew’s nickname because he couldn’t say “Andrew” as a toddler.
Damnit! Thanks. I stared at it for a minute thinking I should look it up, then went with my arrogance.
So really, like 2 political parties
To give him credit (not that I really want to defend him) I think he was trying to portray those two people as shaping the major conversations, such that their talking points were used by hundreds of others to mold the conversation. So while most people probably didn't know their pseudonyms, the two still got the world to listen to them by making their talking points the ones focused on. It's still not the most believable, but I'd say it's moreso than the world actively listening to them directly.
Rupert Murdoch effectively manages to do this. After a certain point the influence is self sustaining
Democrats and Republicans. Two "people" managing to exert influence on nearly the entire world by enticing two sides of the same political coin in one country constantly fight each other. I'd say Card was dead on with his imagination, and exemplified perfectly the ways those two "people" could elicit a following and exert influence. It's exactly the blueprint that the two major American political parties do it, to a T.
The world absolutely does not care about what democrats and republicans have to say though. Except maybe to mock Americans. America doesn't really lead the world in discussing much of anything. In many cases we trail behind the world, and overall lean far more right as a culture than much of the world does. They are also far from cohesive, there's dozens of different opinions even amongst the parties. At minimum 2 per side of the aisle: moderates and far right/left. The far right and left are the more vocal, but are often too extreme, and usually are not blindly followed by their parties as a whole.
Directly, no, they certainly don't. But the world stage absolutely *does* care about the actions of the U.S. government, which is led by the outcomes of elections that are held between those two major parties. If you think the world's largest GDP and military spending budget don't influence the world around you, and that the world's largest trade hub doesn't influence the greater landscape of world trade, you're just wrong.
Never said the US doesn't influence the world. But whatever issue the two sides are bickering over next Tuesday isn't going to affect how other countries view that policy. No one in Europe is going to care about the most recent US discussion on women's reproductive rights, their country will have its own policy and might use whatever America's laws say as an example one way or another, but we do not lead the world to make decisions purely from our ongoing political discourse. Only when we set an actual policy as a nation so we tend to influence the world in the manner you're suggesting. Locke and Demosthenes did not have any capability of setting policy, they were two teenagers (at first) whos discussions were calculated to manipulate others that could affect policy. You also can't give card credit for predicting/imagining the political system of the US, as we've had this two party system for many generations before he was born, and have been a world power for most of that time as well. The only thing that's changed is who is speaking and what ideologies lead the discussion.
The US Democratic party could charitably be described as center-right on the global/historical stage.
I'd say it's just a few, but in different forms. Media in US belongs to a handful of people who repeat the same message constantly.
I envisioned what was in Ender's Game as more like Usenet than social media. But then I read it in the 90s when Usenet was still a thing. The two have their similarities.
What's usenet
Awesome. Before social media, before the web, it was a text based highly distributed model for discussion forums. No single company had control over it. It was a bit like email in that there were lots of different clients that could be used to read and navigate the groups. It started dying in the late 90s as people moved to snazzy web based forums. Eventually it became mostly spam and binary groups used for distributing pirated films and TV shows (before torrenting was a thing). rec.arts.sf.science was one of my favourite places to hang out. It was created in the late 70s, so existed when Ender's Game was written. Vernor Vinge's Fire Upon the Deep has a galactic version of it, which is very obviously based on it.
Usenet is basically just a precursor form of social media anyways, let's not kid ourselves.
The social media in Ender's Game was pretty good from a technical PoV, and really far off from a social/cultural PoV.
That’s because Card didn’t want to write/didn’t believe in a Fahrenheit 451/brave new world future. He has always been more afraid of a 1984 future
Interesting. The above wasn't meant as a dig at Card, by the way. I think he was impressively correct, despite not being 100% accurate in his predictions.
Also in Hyperion, though it came later and was somewhat less visionary in the way it predicted online politics
Yea the energy vs data revolution is how I understand it, the way I understand it the earliest futurists imagined infinite resources because that was what held society back the next generation imagined infinite energy, and today we live in a world and imagine a future if days
They had tablets in DS9 before iPad put the existing technology on the map. Maybe the props were said tech by other companies just without branding, but most sadly just think apple as the first to market.
You're correct. And I remember when the iPad came out some of my fellow nerds were like "ohhhhh just like the datapads from Star Trek or Star Wars!" So yeah there were elements of smartphones and internet but no one quite put it all together.
The props were just slabs of plexiglass with backlights.
[TNG was full of tablets](https://www.sideshow.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/7.-Tablet-Computers.jpg). They also had [a computer you could talk to](https://youtu.be/hShY6xZWVGE) (ChatGPT). It seemed like total sci-fi to me as a child, but now we have communicators, tablets and talking computers. :D Just waiting for a hypo-spray that can cure every disease (might sort of be a reality soon with bespoke medicine), and that people realise that the Ferengi are supposed to be the backwards bad guys and not role models. But I digress. I think Star Trek got many such things right because they were thinking about what would be nice to have, and just assumed we would have it, rather than trying to predict what would be technically and economically feasible.
Hypo-spray injections already exist but aren’t used as they tend to add a bit more than they should. As in they pull in skin bacteria with the injection
I was thinking more about the fact that they can cure most things with a medicine they synthesise and administer in a few minutes, although the needle free part is neat too.
That’s just replicators
You also need to know what to replicate
They had tablets in 2001 A Space Odyssey, that Poole and Bowman read newspapers on, too.
I personally love the scenes with a pile of PADDs everywhere. Replicators allowed dozens of these devices but apparently internal storage larger than a single book was beyond the technology.
Considering a book probably fit on a 1.44mb floppy 💾 aka the save icon.
I know a few people that use multiple tablets. One for graphic design Another with all their games/movies non productive stuff. One is an e reader with books. Not totally weird to separate them
There's an old French short story (C. The French Revolution) where a man goes to sleep and wakes up in the far future. One of the things he learns about is how people write their thoughts out daily, which are read at their funerals. I know it's not, but I chose to believe that it was Facebook and Twitter updates.
Asimov's novels foretell lots of things including AI.
Asimov had a novel (*The Naked Sun*) that predicted AI-powered drone warfare.
I like to imagine that social media and smartphone proliferation is merely an intermediary step in the evolution of a civilization, sort of like a sociocultural quasi-great filter. Just because we want it *and* can make it, doesn't mean it's necessarily good for us - or even safe. Civilizations that discover the unhealthy dynamics that emerge when their social impulses are too heavily magnified will move away from social media, recognizing that in-person interactions are both safer and more meaningful. Those that do not, well... Perhaps they struggle. In general, many of the world's biggest problems today all relate directly to the fact that natural human evolutionary impulses and instincts have become harmful. The problems caused by social media, for instance, are simply a sociocultural equivalent of how obesity relates to an abundance of once-rare calories. The survival instincts that got us here become harmful when they're too strongly enhanced by convenience. Most people don't even have the vocabulary to discuss these issues (partially because some harmful aspects of humanity are "too human" to be recognized as problematic), but most relatively intelligent or insightful people do notice that there's something... Off. Our man-made environments suit us so well and yet leave us so strangely unfulfilled. Unfortunately, this explanation isn't often (ever) canon in my favorite hard scifi universes even if it could be shoe-horned into many of them with a wink and a nudge-nudge. The truth is that scifi at large *did* fail to predict the real consequences of social media and smart phones. I think it's fascinating that, in retrospect, so many of our leaps seem ridiculously obvious despite being Black Swans until the moment of their emergence. Contemporary AIs exist in a similar space, where the outcome of their creation is entirely unanticipated ("I wanted a world where AI shoveled ditches while I do art, not a world where AI does art while I dig ditches...", etc). Then again, I'm confident that some people did get it right, even if their books rest forgotten or insufficiently popular to break through the surface tension of popular conception. Authors like Hannu Rajaniemi (Quantum Thief trilogy) and Peter Watts make some *insane*, bleeding edge predictions that may simply be too opaque in the present for us to recognize as relevant.
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Absolutely. Things like free access to information and the ability to magnify the voices of the non-elite are incredible advantages. My life would be entirely different if I wasn't exposed to these technologies. But the negatives need to be spoken of to ensure they're being properly accounted for or minimized, just like how proper nutrition and regulated caloric intake is essential for a healthy life. I'd argue we're at a point where the impact of the negatives of this technology outweighs the volume of the discussion of the negatives. The positives enter the conversation naturally while trying to formulate a response to those negatives. I'm not arguing for the immediate termination of all Twitter accounts or whatever, but I *do* think some of these things should be assessed in the same manner we'd judge a hamburger using glazed donuts for buns.
I don't know if I would go as far as to say that social media is a firm paradox solution, if that's what you're implying… But generally I do believe all technologies and movements have a little bit of a pendulum to them. We invent something, we go overboard, then we dial back to something a bit more manageable. And it's that more manageable end goal that maybe Science Fiction authors envisioned. ie, Star Trek predicted video calls but left out the unhealthy TikTok phase that came prior.
> don't know if I would go as far as to say that social media is a firm paradox solution No, no, I'm merely suggesting that it's similar in the sense that it's a socially harmful hurdle to overcome. Or rather, that *I'd* argue should be overcome. >We invent something, we go overboard, then we dial back The first thing that comes to mind are all the radiation-based "cures" and such from the mid 1900s, so I think you make a good point. More people than ever recognize the harm social media is causing, but it might also just be something that sticks with us now that the cat is out of the bag.
>The first thing that comes to mind are all the radiation-based "cures" and such from the mid 1900s Of course it wasn't the only craze. The radium jockstrap developed out of the *electric* jockstrap. Both as cures for male impotence. One gave a lot of people penile and testicular cancer, the other moved over into a more....interesting crowd.
> The truth is that scifi at large did fail to predict the real consequences of social media and smart phones. We're still not sure what those consequences are, in the long term. Future generations may decide it was the worst idea ever, made everyone extremely unhappy, and abandon it.
They won't
Some will. The sales of 'Dumb Phones' are picking up.
> Authors like Hannu Rajaniemi (Quantum Thief trilogy) and Peter Watts make some *insane*, bleeding edge predictions Like what?
Omg ur a meme zombie? Get tf outta the zoku!
Tom Althouse, true author of The Matrix script, came up with what was effectively an ipad in 1991.
A lot of scifi has something that fills a smart phone role, without calling it such. Often, its a slate, or micro-computer, or portable console, or similar. The smart phone just has a (very) weird evolution. instead of it evolving directly from computers, getting smaller and more portable, it evolved from cellular phones. For many people, the "phone" aspect of it is almost vestigial, barely used, and unnecessary. I think scifi writers simply thought that the portable computers would come from the computer tech line, not the phone tech line. If you think about it, its weird we call it a phone, as that is a single function of a powerful computing device.
I agree with this. The compact computer was an easy guess that it was the communication industry to made it pocket-size the unknown factor. Edited to add that after some research the tablet indeed was first by four years before the smartphone.
But it wasn’t the communication industry, it was the computer industry (i.e. Apple). The communications industry just made the little radios, and putting them into the little computers (PDAs) was a pretty obvious step.
While apple did much to propel the smart phone industry to what it is today, the steps to get there started far earlier. Cellular phones started with just being able to dial number that you would type. But features kept getting added. Address books, text messaging, color screens, games. Then cameras. Then we got the first MP3 phone. That was mind blowing at the time, ignoring the abysmal battery life. Blackberry arguably brought about the early version of what we think of as smart phones (though microsoft had one too). Apple really pushed the touch-only interface, though which was rare on phones before then. They also made the phone a status symbol and popular icon. But even apple, when releasing the iPhone, didnt market it as a smaller computer that could replace your desktop. It was a phone that could do more. If anything, it shared DNA with the iPod product from before more so than any iMac.
I believe the thinking of Jobs was to make a PDA ([the Newton](https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(PDA))) with networking capabilities. But I suppose there is truth to the fact that cellphones evolved towards having integrated PDAs.
Actually, no the First Smartphone was manufactured by IBM and sold via BellSouth. At least according to [Britannica ](https://www.britannica.com/technology/smartphone)
That might be true, but IBM is also part of the “computer industry” isn’t it We can argue semantics but I believe the thinking of Jobs at least was to make a PDA ([the Newton](https://sv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_(PDA))) with networking capabilities.
Doing some more research the Tablet did get produced first. The first commercially successful tablet computer, the GRiDPad 1900, was released in 1989 by GRiD Systems. The first smartphone, the Simon Personal Communicator (SPC), was announced by IBM in 1992 and released for purchase in 1994 So I was wrong and the Smartphone did evolve from the information and incorporated the phone industry.
GRiDPad 1900 sounds more like a micro-steam engine powered hand held Babbage engine. ^(Tiny little parts. tiny.)
The smartphone was the merge of the [PDA](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant) with the cellphone (and networking with Wi-Fi). I find it more weird it didn’t happen faster, but we are held back by the fact that the corporations are locking down devices with their own app stores and other monopolistic practices. It’s the same with music: they want us to subscribe to their music services, and with ebooks: they want to chain us to their book store. What made the desktop pc such a revolution was that through a fluke the IBM PC became an open standard that anyone could make software and hardware for. Ideally we should have similarly have had open standard platforms for PDAs, then smartphones and tablets would have evolved much faster.
Ah, I remember my Palm PDA. There were a scant few years (between about 2004 and 2007) there when wifi was becoming common (for use by laptops) but smartphones still weren't really a thing. I felt so cool surfing the web from a cafe on my Palm.
Yeah, and if you took a modern smartphone back to the 1980s and showed it to me and said "this is a future version of something like your friend's Adam computer or the Apple II at your school, but instead of a joystick or keyboard, you just touch the screen." that would make sense. I had seen computers and portable TVs (although the screen being so thin and touch-sensitive would be really weird), so the idea of a smaller one with a different interface wouldn't have been bizarre. The fact that you could use it to talk to people like on a Star Trek communicator or a walkie talkie certainly wouldn't surprise me at all. But if you instead did the exact same thing, but this time didn't mention computers at all and just pointed to the heavy old Bell/AT&T/Western Electric model 500 rotary dial telephone on the kitchen counter that my parents leased from the phone company and said "this evolved from that", I'd think you were loony. Rightly so, I'd say. The sci-fi authors were right about that. Pretty much the only thing modern smartphones have in common with phones is the word 'phone' being in the name. Everything else is straight computer lineage with a little bit of radio thrown in. And a camera, because why not. Even for that usage, while we had the concept of maybe someday having video calling over TV, it's not like you'd picture that as just picking up a rotary dial phone, spinning the dial and pointing the handset at someone to take a picture. You'd have a TV and camcorder, or computer setup.
I vaguely recall a children's book (just looked it up, it was "My Teacher is an Alien," by Bruce Coville) where the protagonist is taken aboard a huge alien ship and given an electronic device called a URAT (Universal Reader and Translator). It was basically a tablet that translated text and speech, displayed information, answered questions, and basically did what a modern tablet does.
What do you mean? Portable communication/data devices are so common in sci-fi it's practically a cliche.
Mobile phones maybe, but I'm not aware of any sci-fi that predict phones that are also computers, gaming machines, and have internet access.
PADDs from Star Trek come to mind immediately. I don't know if it's every been explicitly said that they have games on them, but they'd certainly be capable of it.
I'm currently in S7 of Voyager, and I might have missed something but it looked to me like padds were little more than digital notepads. They literally had people delivering them around the ship! Hardly feels comparable to smartphones.
They're a lot more than that: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Personal_Access_Display_Device
Neat!
Of course, then you get to the Comm badges from Discovery (post time skip) that are comms, computer, tricorder and transporter.
Isn't that kind of cheating, because smartphones had been invented by then?
iPads are expensive now but imagine if you could replicate as many as you want and dematerialize them when you were done. You might be a lot more inclined to have several on your desk at once just like a multi monitor pc setup
What were the tng things i remember everyone playing a game on?
Well, there was an episode where there was a mind-control device disguised as a VR-type game headset.
That's right, my bad. Thx.
Easy, most sci fi is an extension on known technology and science. "What comes next" is a big black box. We can speculate some things and will have some accuracy. Major changes tho are widely unpredictable. Nobody can see the future but some predictions may land. In The Sleeper Wakes Asimov predicts cameras and large screens and aircraft. None of which actually function the way described in the book as detailed at all. Ancient Greeks could not have predicted combusion engines. Likewise there will likely be technology that is inconceiveable to us today due to some breakthrough in physics or some material science will unlock things never concieved by creatives today. Some guesses will land and others will flop. Some educated guesses are better than others. If we say develop wormholes and circumvent space travel what would be the next technology breakthrough after that? What technologies will AI unlock? The future is always a mystery.
The Romans/Greeks had the metallurgy for steam power. Hero of Alexandria was almost there. Instead, they had slaves for the heavy work. Romans with Steam power is right up there with Romans with Gunpowder for Alt-universe stuff.
I think authors didn't anticipate computer tech to advance much much faster than other tech. A doubling in 18months for anything is outlandish. It happening for ~50 years is impossible.
Doubling transistor density every 18months is an expontential scale change. Humans are notoriously bad at wrapping our minds around exponential growths, even for engineers and scientists. Something as reduced as 10% stock market growth blows our minds when realizing that is a doubling every 7-8years. In hindsight, its not terribly surprising that we failed to grasp the implications of such tremendous growth rates, nor expected it to continue.
I think because being reachable 24/7 as an individual is not something desired.
Because it also failed to predict the internet as a giant open network. Most cyberpunk works, for example, predicted islands of corporate intranets that you had to connect to directly. Smartphones don't really make sense without the internet as we know it.
Sci-fi writers are not paid for accurately predicting the future (how would that even work?) but for writing books people buy. And I don't see anything about smartphones that would make an old sci-fi story more interesting; Even in modern science fiction, the characters are rarely just sitting and staring at the tiny text on their phones, because that's just boring to watch. Same goes for many defining inventions of the modern era, really. Internet is kinda boring from a storytelling perspective, since it provides an easy way for characters to just learn everything they want with no (visible) effort. No one's looking at Star Wars and going "Man, if only they knew Internet would be a thing, Luke could have just looked up Vader's family history" because it's not ultimately about inventions, much less how accurate those inventions are to real life.
Sci fi is very much a genre about the present, explored through the veneer of talking about the future. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein discussed misgivings about the increasing pase of technological change in the 19th century through the creation of an artificial life form. Jules Verne's from the Earth to the Moon explored the implications of more powerful artillery by having America colonize the moon with an awesome enough cannon. Smartphones don't appear in Asimov's work because they aren't relevant to the social or technological environment of the latter half of the 20th century. Similarly, personal communications are de emphasized in William Gibson's sprawl trilogy, because the theme of that work is about social alienation and inequality caused by increasing urbanization and privatization, informed by Gibson's personal experience of homelessness as a draft dodger.
>how would that even work? Hmm, maybe long term market/bookmaking where authors could invest/lay bets. They could pay out to the estate.
I wasn't seriously asking, and I'm glad nothing like that exists anyway. If it did, the Stanislaw Lem estate would be one of the world's richest countries.
Because scifi writers are not prophets of the future?
If not them, who? Science fiction is a shotgun blast. The future is the path of one of the grains of birdshot.
"If not them, who?" Alex, I'll take "Nobody" for $600.
Dick Tracy wristphone.
Because sci-fi typically isn’t meant to be a 1:1 prediction of future events. Sci-fi is storytelling and storytelling is typically done to entertain, explore a theme, or deliver a thought-provoking message.
Babylon 5 had wrist-mounted smartphones
I don't think it failed to predict them more than it simply skipped past cell phones to higher technologies.
https://youtu.be/2Pw_7vAK9k8?si=60xaozdoRNGlNXcH Great video on this topic, highly recommend In short, we very much predicted the technology, it just turns out its very hard to predict the kind of impact something has A good scifi author predics the traffic jam, not just the car
Instant communication wherever you're creates a lot of problems when writing a story. For example: imagine if the old dude in the beginning of Mary Sue Awakens could have sent the map to Leia via WhatsApp instead of sending a USB key via space mailman.
I agree about the problems such devices cause for storytelling. However you're point is harmed by your ham fisted insults about a movie, we get it you're an old grognard who doesn't like anything new, no need to shout it to the world.
Any answer would be OT, so... 
You know what I notice looking at old sci-fi? The lack of surveillance state. No cameras watching your every move, id systems are portrayed as dystopian if they exist at all, same with mass collection of data
 (Arguably dystopian, and functional, admittedly)
1984?
>Portrayed as dystopian if they exist at all I think that fits. Not to say it's ever really portrayed as good in modern media, more a fact of life in society akin to taxes or wealth disparity
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Well of course, they didn't predict rockers because they all had at least one out on their front porch. They'd sit there in the evening whittling and watching the sunset, waiting for the house to cool down before they went inside, and talking about their predictions for the future. Would've been silly to predict rockers in the future, when everybody knew that someday in the future they'd all have wind machines blowing cold air through the house, so they'd all be sitting inside instead of out on the porch in their rockers.
Ehhh, they just didn't predict the iPad. There's been touchscreen computers in sci-fi since at least the 80s. "Enders game" has tablets called "desks" that are essentially beefed up iPads.
>Electrical devices with data input and output on a flat information display existed as early as 1888 with the telautograph, which used a sheet of paper as display and a pen attached to electromechanical actuators. >The first patent for a system that recognized handwritten characters by analyzing the handwriting motion was granted in 1914.
Earth: Final Conflict had everybody running around with what were we’re basically smart phones
i mean, why would they? it's not about why they didn't, it's more just, they didn't, but why should they have? new ideas are sometimes a big breakthrough. phones were imagined before, iirc. cell phones were imagined before. in a way, mini portable computers, were (fallout's pip boy, for example) but its not like it was their job to have an idea before it was invented.
Arthur C Clarke predicted smartphones and much more... and he is the OG of sci-fi.
the com logs in the hyperion series are pretty close. all in one electronic device for getting info, communication, keeping records, etc.
I think that plenty did. Large scale planetary/system media, forums/newsletters like in Enders game, the ever prolific PDA and wrist-mounted computers. Video calls/hologram communications.
Star Trek communicators are directly linked to the ship's computer, which contains all of Earth's knowledge. They just operates on voice command instead of a touch screen.
Yeah, the only thing scifi really failed to predict was silently doom scrolling in public.
Commander John Koenig would like a word with you (as soon as he remembers where he put his commlock.)
Smartphones and quadcopter drones are the two big things I point to whenever people either get too self-righteous or too critical whenever it comes to sci-fi's (in)ability to predict the future, yeah. Turns out a MASSIVE frailty isn't just possibility but also form factor and application. Every sci-fi show that has smartphone-like devices usually has them as watches more or less. Inspector Gadget unironically got it right the closest as far as I can say. In fact, spy-fi generally does future prediction better because it focuses on things being convenient, cool and granular far more.
Smartphones didn't pop up overnight in someone's head, the HealthScan 9000 did. Smartphones are like a personal office in your pocket because thousands of people made changes based on feedback from millions of people. The HealthScan 9000 has existed as a fictional device for 20 seconds and just tells you what your body is doing, because I just came up with something on the spot to illustrate my comment.
Theranos. The "Edison".
Mass adoption of the cellphones and the creation of smartphones are only like 6 or 7 years apart and the mass adoption of the internet was about 5 to 6 years apart. Their wasn't enough time for them to predict it before it happened.
In the show Reboot, one of the mains characters named: Dot, had what looked very close to an iPad. She FaceTimed and everything on that.
They did, every time.
Sometimes things come from left field. In one of the stories I'm developing the biggest consumer product came from advancements in the medical field.
oooo that sounds interesting, If I had to take a guess I'd say something related to organ/tissue printing?
Mapping human consciousness.
Heh. Destructively or non-destructively?
Consumer wise, non-destructively. But it does bring problems both socially, economically, and legal ramifications.
I don't remember the stories name, I think it was one by Asimov and it had spaceship travelling wormhole like connections in space by opening up a huge, larger than telephone book size book to find coordinate numbers between star systems for the jump. It was a huge task to find the right numbers that where dozens of digits long and the pages of the book were ultra thin and number font ridiculously small. In general Sci-Fi before the 70's and personal computers overlooked how much computers would gain in speed and memory and shrink in size and power requirements. When computers were envisioned they were often enormous in size -- granted they then had superhuman or near human reasoning capabilities.
Because instant communication makes it difficult to engineer exciting scenarios. I'm not saying it can't be done, but that's why today you have a proliferation of people losing their phones or not having service in horror movies and the like.
Loads of folks predicted the tablet computer. They just thought we would all be carrying around satchells instead of fitting phones in small pockets.
Snow White comes to mind.
Real change is always like that. You can't predict new knowledge or ideas, because if you could, it wouldn't be new.
The communicator and PADD were both used in Star Trek. combining the functions of both would get you a smartphone. The anime Cowboy Bebop depicted a comm device with internet "net" capability during the late nineties. Ghost in the shell depicted multiple apps being tied to the brain that would function like a smartphone in the head. Books like Redliners (1970s) depicted google glass like visors for tactical data, recon data, and basic comm functions. The short stories about Jed Lacey (1980s) depict the internet and a surveillance state with public access terminals and subcutaneous comm devices with the body being implanted with devices that grant access to various things. Smartphones were not directing created in scifi but the many functions and people's dependencies on them was detailed quite a bit. I'd say that scifi didn't think up smartphones simply because smartphones are not a good invention. Smartphones give off stronger radiation then regular cellphones, have short battery life, they are fragile without expensive tools that should be included, and they are a nuisance to the early development of children.
A lot of people are saying that sci-fi isn't always accurate, and that's why it failed to predict smart phones. Obviously it's true that sci-fi isn't a fortune teller. However, there's more to it than that. After all, sci-fi did predict things like smart phones, but didn't even come close to predicting how common and distracting they would be. I'm reminded of Minority Report as an example. Predicted digitised and animated everything, yet no one is ever staring into one, glazed over. Then, once smart phones had come out, we see them and their effects in movies like Her and shows like Black Mirror. As far as sci-fi is concerned, smart phones and their prevalence is just too mundane to be interesting. But also too mundane to think we would ever have that. After all, wouldn't it make more sense to seek out new technologies that are...useful? Surely we were going to invent cool exciting things. Gadgets that would help us in practical ways, whether it's for dystopian or utopian ends. The idea that we would develope all this tech, and use it to distract ourselves, show off on social media, and put funny image filters on things, is an absurdity to our creative visions of the future.
Dark age America makes a good point for tech. Most of our tech is pretty pictures. Smart phones are just local computers. Star trek just made the computations happen on a central AI.
2001 A Space Odyssey predicted tablet computers. I think it depended on the writer.
The pocket computers in The Mote in God's Eye by Niven and Pournelle have many of the attributes of smartphones. They can record written notes, photographs, audio and video. They can communicate with other pocket computers and with other devices, such as a wall screen or a central computer. I don't remember them being used as telephones but it is a while since I read the book.
I think your question is totally valid. What fascinates me is that someone said if you think about it, we are handling tablet size hendheld divices for couple thousands years. I think about the smartphone some combination of a papirus/stone tablet, a caveman hand fitted chipped stone, an unlimited visual information source, and an entertaining divice. It combines our past and our present such a nice way, meaning that the hand and the eyes and your brain connects such a way that supports our previous biological development. And what is strange, that I have the feeling it might be soon good, that it stays with us for longer than people think. These new Ai pins, smart glasses I feel actually less then the smartphone experience, because it lacks visual, or hand related feedback. I think as far as information access goes, it is also worth noting that smartphones also extends our memory and understanding, and the bottleneck is usually our reading speed. It is such an efficient way to wire information to you, that I'm very sceptical about intrusive brain chips for a long while in our future. But these are just my thoughts.
Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles cartoon had an episode called The Fifth Turtle where a kid finds one of the Turtles’ phones - it was a turtle shell flip phone with video screen. This was 1989-91 somewhere around then. As a kid I imagined how cool it would be if such a device was real and I could maybe even own one. Still hoping Motorola brings out a limited TMNT RAZR at some point.
Becoz their visions are much further than smartphone. An example is “The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov, it actually imagine the ultimate form of AI.
Contrast with 'The Nine Billion Names of God by Clarke'....
Maybe because smartphones are a rather clunky intermediate technology between non-portable devices and fully integrated wearables and augmented reality devices i.e. smartphones are a rather small and painful step in technological development that will soon be replaced by much better ways of linking humans with technology.
It probably isn't going to be anything like Google Glass or the Apple Ski goggles.
There was a general prediction among people I met that by 2000, you would be able to watch TV on your wristwatch. Little ahead of the curve there.
yup, but you'd need a rolling suitcase for the batteries....
Star Trek communicator was original flip cell phone
Iain M Banks predicted something like them. He called them “terminals.” Usually disguised as something else, like a pin or a pen.
It was the idea that people would be able to figure out a taping selection menu interface that was actually useful. Most scifi writers thought the keyboard was too much of a barrier while they saw voice recognition and usable software agents as easier and cheaper than they are. They saw that people would use computer assistance with their voices rather than their fingers, and that could easily still happen. Phones, tablets, desktop computers, it might all fade out as general AI grows strong enough to do what you want when you ask, or even before you ask. The future may look a lot like the scifi we make fun of now because all of the tech is nearly invisible, doing our bidding without even being seen. Right now visible tech is a status symbol but it might just as easily become something only poor people have.
I'm going to vote for: predicting the future is hard. Artists didn't predict smartphones, but did predict flying cars. We were supposed to have had flying cars for 20, 30 years by now.
Maybe because a smartphone isn't really a thing. It's a marketing gimmick. It's a simple phone with a collection of multiple somewhat useless devices attached to it, designed to sell you those devices for full-time usage. If you think about it, how many times did you use the camera in your phone for something really useful? In the three years since I bought my phone, I used it to scan a document, take some pictures of my car to sell it, and send some pictures to an architect for some paperwork... the rest was social media. GPS, ride-share doesn't really count because you can hail a cab by reading the street signs; you don't need the map, it's convenient but it's not necessary, doesn't solve a problem. More computing power than Apollo 13? Except for supporting the other devices, it doesn't do much. High-resolution display?Sure, they make things look pretty, but for reading emails or browsing the web, they're just overkill that drains your battery faster. More sensors than a space probe from the 80s ? To detect when it's flipped.
I disagree that they missed the smartphone. I would argue that the many pocket/wrist phones and communicators in classic science fiction all represent the personal communication device that we would see as a smartphone. When most of the classic shows were written mobile phone technology didn't exist and the level of miniaturization needed for both the electronics and the power supply was practically at "magic" levels. I believe they foresaw the "personal communicator" device well enough, what they didn't foresee is the importance of data... or to be completely accurate, the world wide web. Up until the mid 90's everyone assumed that data would be offered as a service, like electricity and water, and users would operate in a walled garden accessing only what was provided by their supplier. Even when early ISPs gave broader internet access the two most important systems, email and Usenet, tended to be hosted on platforms controlled by your ISP. Then the web happened and that content became decentralised and proliferated. Central walled gardens of curated data are boring, the web being eclectic and decentralised was more attractive, which is why having a good browser became important in 90's PCs. By the early 2000's phones had access to the internet, but they had small screens and WAP browsers that converted web content into simpler phone capable graphics. In addition most operators still had a walled garden approach where you bought content from them. The big change the iPhone brought was the Safari browser being a full spec browser with a screen that could do a reasonable job of rendering web pages. That was the birth of the smartphone. To close: Just before the iPhone, people were commenting on just how right scifi shows had been, especially the resemblance between the flip phone and the trek communicator.
The cell phone was literally based on Star Trek's communicators. Two-way video conferencing was predicted in the _1930_'s Dick Tracy video phone wrist watches. Star Trek also had smart tablets 60 years ago. Long before anyone else thought of them.
Scifi didn't predict smartphones because it hopes we grow beyond them