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0 pointsdanaris15d ago0 comments

Most sci-fi from prior to the smartphone age did not foresee pocket-sized interconnected computing and communications devices, and certainly did not foresee how they would be commonly used. Where they addressed it at all, they largely predicted computing to either remain in roughly the form factors of the ages they were writing in, or move to something holographic and largely impractical, with the most commonly-expected advancement being sentience (and that sentience being expected well before 2026 in many cases—eg, 2001: A Space Odyssey).

Despite certain people's protestations to the contrary, we are nowhere near having a human-level conversational computer assistant able to fuzzily interpret our requests correctly every time...but our computing is also not primarily done on "comconsoles" or any of the other versions of stationary computers, nor are we jabbing and swiping our hands at interfaces projected on the air in front of us.

More generally speaking, except in the hardest of hard sci-fi, the most common kinds of advancement "predicted" are those that are convenient for the story. This means a lot of faster-than-light travel, universal translators, and for visual media many voice-enabled interfaces of one sort or another, as well as the aforementioned holographic interfaces (so we can see the user's face and the interface at the same time).

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ggrelet15d ago· 1 in thread

In Dan Simmons' Hyperion, the characters have a device called comlog. It's a portable device which connects to a broad network. It also has the ability to read vital constants.

The author is quite vague about it, no doubt, and that's one of his staples. But he foresaw something human would carry to get connected to other humans and information.

(That book won the Hugo award in 1990)

danarisOP15d ago

Neat, and one I haven't heard of! But the existence of one or a small handful of sci-fi authors who happened to predict it doesn't change the fact that they're the exception, few and far between. Search through the vast library of science fiction written in the past century and a half and you will find at least one example of something you can interpret as predicting almost any modern technology. But there are elements that become much more prominent, whether because they become individually well-known, or because they spread through an entire branch of the genre, and nothing that looks particularly like smartphones was among them.

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