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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

That's one of the usual failures of science fiction: most authors imagine technological progress, but don't also predict what societal changes it might bring. So this family had a quaint picture-book suburban 1950s life, just with robots. Same as Asimov's Detective Baley smoked a pipe and had a traditional 1950s marriage with a stay-at-home wife - just with robots...

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I think you have to distinguish what the author can imagine and what the audience could likely accept. Part of writing stories is engaging the readers, who have biases of their own.

The usual response here is, any author can predict the horseless carriage, only a true visionary will predict the traffic jam and road rage.

I don't know that it because Bradbury couldn't predict the changes. See The Veldt for example. It is more that painting an idyllic 1950's life cast a sharper contrast with the destruction and thus had stronger impact.

> Same as Asimov's Detective Baley smoked a pipe and had a traditional 1950s marriage with a stay-at-home wife - just with robots..

How do you know that will not happen in the future?

A hugely different society might look more like past than the present.

Vaping brought smoking back and pipe smoking is trending back upwards for the first time in decades. New bars where people can smoke cigars and pipes have shown up in my city again after a recent push to get a dedicated ABC license for that.

Trends are sometimes cyclical. (Not to be light about lung cancer being a trend, of course. I don't get why smoking is back. I'm just pointing out that it is back in the 2020s.)

They don't even predict all the technological changes. I love how in William Gibson's Neuromancer they have VR, true AI, and even fancy orbital resorts, but not mobile phones!

If you can climb inside the sensorium of a hot assassin and feel it in your mind when she pinches her nipple, what is the point of an iPhone?

The people in that world moved pretty far beyond cellphones in a couple hundred years, and that’s okay. I’m sure you’ve noticed there aren’t a lot of phone booths around anymore…

True, but in the Neuromancer universe they still have public pay phones and at one point the main AI keeps ringing the phones to get the main character to answer as there doesn't seem to be any other way for it to contact someone when they aren't jacked in to cyberspace.

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