Sci-fi is Just a Product Roadmap for Technology Companies Now
I am a huge sci-fi fan. It's my favourite genre for media consumption be it books, tv shows, movies, video games etc. Between reading The Three-Body Problem, Project Hail Mary, and Dune, and rewatching Star Trek the Next Generation (my favourite Star Trek series) for the 30th time, I spend a solid chunk of my time going down sci-fi and technology rabbit holes in the internet.
But lately, while consuming all this sci-fi media, I’ve realized something - We are getting closer and closer to a reality where "fiction" is no longer relevant for the science fiction genre. Very soon, we'll need to rename this genre to science non-fiction or simply call it non-fiction.
Science fiction used to be a wild, fantastical guess about a distant future. Today? It’s basically just a product roadmap for technology companies.
The Speed of Arrival
What is truly mind-blowing isn't just how fast the tech has arrived, but how fast society normalizes it.
Sci-fi used to give us a 50-year buffer to prepare for the future. Now, the buffer is practically non-existent. It took the telephone 75 years to reach 50 million users. It took television 22 years. It took ChatGPT exactly two months to reach 100 million users. The lag between a crazy sci-fi concept and a reality you can buy on Amazon is shrinking by the day.
The Miraculous is Now Mundane
The funniest part about living in the future is how quickly we get annoyed by it. We are surrounded by actual miracles that we treat like mild inconveniences. Look at the tech that used to define the genre -
The Minority Report UI: In 2002, Tom Cruise standing in front of a screen, swiping through data with his hands in Minority Report was the absolute peak of futuristic interfaces. Fast forward to today, and spatial computing headsets use eye-tracking and micro-finger pinches to do exactly that. What used to be an elite, pre-crime police interface is now what teenagers use to watch YouTube in their living rooms.
The Babel Fish Reality: In The Hitchhiker’s Guide, you needed a literal alien fish in your ear to translate languages. Today, I can hold my phone up to a menu in Tokyo and an AI uses the camera sensor to overlay the English translation in real-time, while a pair of earphones can translate live conversations. We built a digital Babel fish, and we mostly use it to ask where the bathroom is on holiday.
The Tricorder Metric: We all wanted the Star Trek Tricorder that could instantly diagnose a patient. Today, the global wearable healthcare market is racing past $180 billion. Smartwatches can take an ECG, track blood oxygen and detect car crashes, while pocket-sized ultrasounds plug directly into smartphones to do actual Tricorder work in the field.
Smartphones & Touch Screens: We have the sleek, flat glass "PADDs" from Star Trek and the exact handheld communicators the crew used to contact the ship. We possess a pocket-sized rectangle containing the sum of all human knowledge, and I mostly use mine for the most mundane tasks like texting, browsing the interwebs or occasionally taking pictures of my dog.
A Brief Detour Through Dystopia
Now, I will admit that for a long time, watching this fiction become reality was purely awesome. But over the last decade or so I feel like the vibe has shifted.
We were aiming for the post-scarcity, exploratory utopia of Starfleet. Instead, we accidentally downloaded the corporate surveillance, cyber-attack, rogue AI expansion pack from Ready Player One or The 100.
Don't get me wrong, I work in data. I am fully pro-innovation. But as AI gets more autonomous and the surveillance gets more invisible, I’d love it if we could deploy these things responsibly. Let's install a few basic guardrails before things get out of hand and we have to resort to a Dune-style Butlerian Jihad just to get rid of the thinking machines.
The New Non-Fiction, The Product Roadmap
Dystopian quirks aside, you have to step back and appreciate the absolute absurdity of the baseline we are living in.
Science fiction is no longer about predicting the future. It's just non-fiction with a slight delay. The things that made our jaws drop when we read them as kids are now just the infrastructure of our daily lives.
We are officially living in the future and I urge you to think about this question: What is the one piece of everyday tech you use that still feels like it belongs in a sci-fi movie?
By the way, I'm still just waiting for a teleporter so I can skip all the airport shenanigans.
Live Long and Prosper \\//