We love imagining the future. Much of the news is taken up with guessing what will happen next: weather, sports, the election, the stock market… And betting on the future is the engine that drives Wall Street as well as Las Vegas. Science fiction, often described as “stories about the future,” is prone to being judged by the degree to which it succeeds in predicting what is yet to be, and mainstream commentators often praise science fiction writers for being prescient, as though they are modern Delphic oracles or Philip K. Dick’s precogs come to life.
This is all very ridiculous to people who enjoy science fiction, since the genre has an abysmal record of making accurate predictions. Just look around you. The year 2000 has long come and gone, and we don’t have killer robots with humanoid skeletons roaming a post-nuclear hellscape, nor do we have manned missions to Jupiter supervised by a sentient AI nostalgic for its childhood. (To be sure, we do live with chatbots capable of writing haikus about Bitcoin—but one may well consider that the actual dystopian scenario). We don’t have flying cars, despite them being regularly predicted for a century and becoming de rigueur in science fiction milieus.
To be sure, many science fiction authors explicitly reject the idea that their work should be read as predictive. Ursula K. Le Guin, for instance, writes, “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.” However, enough authors embrace the prophetic role that “science fiction tells us our future” remains the defining view of the genre. Moreover, despite the lack of accurate, concrete predictions, science fiction continues to exert a powerful influence on how the general public thinks about new technology. Concepts like “Big Brother,” “virtual reality,” “metaverse,” “cyberspace,” and so forth have entered the popular lexicon. They are used to describe contemporary technologies, even though the real-world versions are nothing like their original, science-fictional depictions.
One example of this phenomenon is the ubiquitous, constant state of surveillance we now live under in the West, accomplished mainly by individuals making rational, voluntary choices over the last few decades to progressively trade away their privacy for convenience. There are indeed cameras and recording devices everywhere at all times, but our Big Brother is not the Orwellian hyper-totalitarian state; instead, it’s a many-tentacled monster cobbled together from technology companies, advertisers, governments (at all levels), “agentic” bots that seek to make us their agents, bad laws, internet mobs and trolls, loneliness, laziness, the false promise of genuine connection via social media, and above all, our imperfect selves. When we say Orwell is “prescient,” we are really praising his skill at crafting an evocative metaphor, not his predictive ability.