In 1968, the writer Arthur C. Clarke described a small handheld device that would let people read newspapers from anywhere in the world, receive messages instantly, and watch moving pictures on a bright screen. He called it a 'newspad'. He was, of course, describing the smartphone — thirty years before anyone actually built one. Most of Clarke's other predictions came true too: satellite communications, the personal computer, video calls. He got the timing almost right.
Not every science-fiction prediction has aged so well. Both writers and scientists in the 1960s promised us flying cars by the year 2000, colonies on Mars by 2010, and a cure for every disease by 2020. None of those has happened. All of them are still 'coming soon'. Meanwhile, nobody in 1968 predicted that the biggest technological change of the 21st century would be a piece of glass in your pocket that shows you videos of strangers dancing.
The pattern is clear. Predictions about MACHINES tend to be too optimistic: we thought we would have robot butlers and personal jetpacks by now. Predictions about SOFTWARE and INFORMATION tend to be too PESSIMISTIC: none of the great writers of the 1960s imagined a single company knowing what four billion people had for breakfast. Every generation of scientists gets some of it right, some of it wrong — and almost none of it in the order they expected.
What no science-fiction writer of the 20th century really predicted was the speed of biological discovery. In just three years — 2020 to 2023 — the world designed, tested, produced and delivered several new vaccines to billions of people, decoded the structure of nearly every human protein with AI, and began human trials of gene-editing cures for sickle cell and blindness. Every one of these was, until very recently, pure science fiction.
