Science Fiction's Predictions for the Future

 

Science Fiction's Predictions for the Future

Can you imagine a society that contains a mixture of humans and cyborgs disguised as humans functioning together? Well, that’s what James Cameron’s The Terminator predicts for us in a short 9 years, 2029. If you’ve seen the movie franchise, you know Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character travels from 2029 back to 1984. Needless to say, Cameron had big dreams for technological advancements in the 21^st century.

Science fiction movies with ideas about technological advancements are not so uncommon. According to Aikat (2014), “science fiction has inspired visions of future media developments” for years and has “enabled us to transform technologies and tools” that we use in current everyday life. We haven’t yet advanced to a time of flying cars, but according to Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element, that won’t happen until around the year 2263, so we (the human race) have about 243 years to figure out the technology and make it happen.

 

Movies seem to present the unimaginable in technological advancements, but it’s actually pretty common for “researchers to use ‘science fiction prototyping’ as a practical guide to using fiction as a way to imagine our future in a whole new way.” Innovators are constantly empowered to explore the social, political, legal and ethical realms of technological advancements to imagine and create a new world. Essentially, they are conceptualizing the future by using science facts and fiction. We see this in how the online newspaper genre emerged in the mid-1900s. It was the first step in reshaping the consumption of news, and with this radical shift, newspaper firms had to re-organize their production and presentation strategies of news and services to meet readers’ new needs.

 

Though we may not quite be ready to operate flying cars, we are on our way and it’s obvious that writers of science fiction stories are thinking of new ideas by the minute.