time travel, antigravity, teleportation, sentient silicon beings. our yearning to visualize the future has always been far ahead of our technological prowess. to predict the future of technology in the 21st century and take a look back at preposterous postulations of the past, what better source to turn to than a bona fide science-fiction writer? after all, when sci-fi writers ask "what if?" their extrapolations are sometimes astonishingly accurate. we asked david gerrold, sci-fi author and writer of the most-popular-ever star trek episode"the trouble with tribbles," from the original tv series. here's his survey of the high-tech imaginings of sci-fi writers arthur c. clarke, robert a. heinlein, isaac asimov, h.g. wells, and more.
cell phones: in robert a. heinlein's 1954 book the star beast, hero john thomas stuart xi is riding his horse when he pulls his ringing phone out of his saddlebag. the first incarnation of a personal tricorder, stuart's phone is also a video and voice recorder. motorola's flip phone was inspired by the original star trek communicators.
flat-screen tvs: oversize tv screens were visualized as early as the 1936 movie things to come, and isaac asimov predicted wall-sized 3d videophones in the naked sun (1956), in which tv images have such lifelike clarity that people communicate only by video. but it wasn't until 1997 that pioneer started selling hdtv plasma displays, which were 50 inches diagonal. at the 2006 ces (consumer electronics show) in las vegas, panasonic demonstrated a 103-inch display.
household robots: czech author karel capek's play rossum's universal robots premiered in prague in 1921, and he's credited with popularizing the word "robot." lester del rey predicted household robots in "helen o'loy," a short story he wrote in 1938. and in one of jack williamson's most famous tales, "with folded hands" (1947), robots take over all human jobs to keep people from hurting themselves. isaac asimov is credited with developing the concept of self-contained, autonomous, human-like machines. his robot stories explored many of the philosophical questions of assimilating self-aware machines into society. today we have industrial robots that assemble cars and motherboards, and disneyland has the asimo robot, which walks across a stage and waves. but we're still a long way away from useful general-purpose robots. roomba isn't it. dg predicts: robots are inevitable. i expect to see general-purpose robots available by 2015.
the internet: the real honor of predicting the internet goes to murray leinster's 1946 short story "a logic named joe," in which people use devices called "logics," essentially television displays with keyboards attached. on these they can watch tv, get weather reports, ask research questions, send e-mail, trade stocks, and play games. leinster's story also predicted content censorship.
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