Futurist Fruition
MSD and CotF made predictions that are coming true!
In the best science fiction, it doesn’t really matter that it’s science fiction, not to the human story(ies). That’s especially true of technology and technobabble.
But let’s not kid ourselves. Stories that employ science-based writing devices to set up the world and the characters who grew up in that world carry a burden. A burden of plausibility. And by definition it’s stricter with realism-based sci fi.
It can’t be too easy or it’s boring, or at least not science fiction at all.
If it’s too far out, it’s magic, which is a very different mindset.
Allow me to enjoy some predictions I made in my first two novels which when I wrote them were just my best guesses, my best predictions, but which are now looking more and more real, satisfying (at least for now) that plausibility burden. The writer in me is barely 18 years old and needs encouragement and validation, so I’m gonna do some of that right now. :)
“Minimum Safe Distance”
At least a decade ago while writing MSD, I predicted that a proper understanding of the universe must come from reconciling gravity and the quantum. I called it the “quantum subspace” or the “nonlocal subspace”. Anyone with ties to science a decade ago could have predicted it, but I was unaware of anyone doing so. Discussions at the time, those of which I was aware, simply didn’t go there. It was still a time when gravity was a mystery, just like the observations which led to the concepts of dark matter and dark energy. That was just the way it was and the way it would be for the foreseeable future.
Speaking of which, MSD also predicted that our conceptions of the universe which spawned the concepts of dark matter and dark energy (which some call ‘intellectually lazy’) were inadequate and that coming up with a functioning theory of “nonlocal subspace” would render them irrelevant. At the time, no one was saying that, not in my circles.
Guess what Vijay Balasubramanian, Brian Greene, and others are saying these days? (these pics should be links… go down the rabbit hole!)
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIqVnFtOSr4
www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L6hinhDXQE
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/12/241220133038.htm
Taken together, these show that science is starting to coalesce around those same ideas: gravity-quantum unification through entanglement/nonlocal effects, and theories that evaporate the older concepts of dark matter and dark energy.
That feels good! Not only from a “hey, my fiction’s predictions aren’t yet becoming dated, and might actually look better right now” mercenary standpoint, but also from a personal validation and encouragement standpoint. :)
MSD also wove the computing singularity together with high nanotech. Those concepts taken separately are nothing new to science fiction, but I’m not aware of them having been considered together as a totally transformative sociotechnological force.
Science news routinely includes articles on incremental advances in quantum computing and nanotechnology. And it’s possible there might be sci fi out there which has creatures like the SelfMade, but I suspect they’d merely be treated as “out of control technological threats” rather than a form of evolution.
(Spoiler alert: I do that, too, with the ‘Enhanced Inheriteds’, but it’s not the technology that’s the threat, it’s human nature.)
One other prediction made in MSD, which is actually related to the above, has to do with using quantum entanglement for high speed communication.
(Spoiler alerts: The Cosmologist uses it for instantaneous communication at a distance, after an establishment process. And while still in school, Laurence builds equipment for something like this for her drone project.)
When I wrote those elements into the story, actual long-distance information transmission via entanglement/nonlocal science was still considered an impossibility. I think it probably still is, but I pushed on that, since I was absolutely convinced that we don’t yet understand nonlocality/entanglement. Here’s a recent article that says the same ‘previously thought impossible’ thing about achieving entanglement communication over a busy, optically messy cable:
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/12/241220132655.htm
And these articles get into how noise actually improves a hybrid quantum teleportation system, and generally support the sci fi idea of near-instant, long distance, entanglement-based communication.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/05/240502113805.htm
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130815084411.htm
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160921082605.htm
While it’s only been a couple of years since MSD was released, I wrote these elements into it about a decade ago, so it’s nice to see its futurism fruition!
“Custodians of the Future”
CotF didn’t get into many sci/tech predictions per se, more sociological ones and cli-fi ones.
The whole “Great Ostriching” thing was based on the 20th century’s obsession with the fictional 1950s following WW2 coupled with the 21st century’s MAGA cult’s inability to face facts as basic as a round earth, criticality of vaccinations, and the Russian genocidal Western-destabilization invasion of Ukraine, i.e. Russia is still very much the enemy of governments of/by/for The People.
But (spoiler alert), in a brief segment, CotF toyed with the idea that fully sentient AI would come from the sex industry, and that non-porn industries will want to avoid fully sentient AI due to rights/personhood/control issues. This hasn’t quite yet come to pass, but I doubt that the porn industry has any such concerns. According to one of the articles below, the porn industry ‘chews up and spits out’ women, which is what led to the OnlyFans sub-industry. Why would the porn industry care about the rights of fully sentient AIs, as long as it can maintain control of them?
Check out the following articles. CotF’s prediction is looking less and less wacky.
https://www.wired.com/story/content-creators-in-the-adult-industry-want-a-say-in-ai-rules/
There are other such articles, and I’m confident this issue won’t be going away. I will not be surprised to see articles in a few years with the industry experts saying, “Yeah, we were wrong, AI ran the table and porn AI is now at the forefront of AI development, including rushing willy nilly toward sentience” (just like it rushed willy nilly, so to speak, into its present form after the development of the internet). Let’s keep an eye on that.
Anyway
As long as the world still engages in the pursuit of basic knowledge, it continues to be fascinating to occasionally visit science communicator sites to catch up on the latest thinking, research, and findings. And I need to watch Star Talk more often. :)