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Comment by mark_l_watson | Hacker News Reader

Nice. Two really interesting people. A new friend of mine directed the movie "Timothy Leary's Dead", which coincidentally I bought this morning before I saw this HN link. My Dad's girlfriend also knew Leary and I plan on watching this movie with her and my Dad.

Also, I had forgotten about Mondo 2000 - nice blast from the past.

Also part 2: Gibson, if you ignore a few classic writers like James Joyce, is my favorite author. I may be really wrong, but I expect that the social structures in his cyber punk books (like the Sprawl, Corporate Ecologies, etc.) may actually be our future.

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Those social structures are certainly salient, but do - sincerely - hope we see some positive alternative become prominent in the public mind.

It would seem, in a post-COVID 2022, writing from cash-is-gone Shenzhen, the welcome mat of the PRD-sprawl with news today of Canada's anti-protest crackdowns, Korean epidemia, and Chinese naval lasers off the Australian coast, that Gibson understated the human appetite for autocracy and big governance and overstated the facility of megacorps to succeed from nation states as the dominant social architects. Having worked in Samsung HQ, corporate dystopias melded with neo-Confucian or other East Asian culture-derived hierarchies are very much real. Only the AIs and some smart materials are yet to come. Synth-food is on the mark and flying robotics is technically here but not yet accepted by regulators. As someone I met from a major Chinese tech company yesterday said, as he confided corporate think-tank strategic future visions of a phone-free 5G future where smart surfaces like taxi windows beamed real time computing from the privacy-unobtainable corporate cloud and autonomous facial identification precluded antiquated rituals of QR-code based mobile payment, nobody cares about privacy and convenience is king. Gibsonian dystopia is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

Are there any good studies of how well particular sci-fi writers predicted the future and what processes they used to attempt it. I say this

a) As I remember an article ranking John Bruner as one of the best, but can't remember where I read it, though a web search revealed this article [1] listing some of his significant successes in guessing right (though he had some misses as well).

b) It lists some of the techniques he tried to do this, 3 years reading up on a variety of topics, visited various places and did some 'parallel thought exercises'?

Is there anything similar for any other sci-fi writers or series as it reminds me of the psychohistory idea that popped up recently in Asimov's Foundation TV series which is a rabbit-hole in itself [2].

[1] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190509-the-1968-sci-fi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory

You might find this paper interesting:

Better Made Up: The Mutual Influence of Science fiction and Innovation

https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/better_made_up_the_mutu...

I’ve heard much more cyberpunk people than I’ll ever be argue it’s the other way around. That WG didn’t predict the future but the futures comes to be as there’s a generation of people really kinda thinking it makes sense and living it. I guess we’ll find out.

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