• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Things That Science Fiction Got Wrong…

Mark6 said:
January issue of "Wired" mentions an expert system program designed to assist pathologists with post-mortem diagnosis. Apparently the program has better record than most (all?) living pathologists; its problem was that it gave the answer too fast. People would not trust its answers until programmers added some delay loops and blinking lights to create an impression of prolonged furious calculation.

So blinking lights still serve a purpose!
Click to expand...

Ohhhhh, I see. It’s a pretty, shinny, bright, flashing placebo device.
:D
 
BenBurch said:
What were Asimov's Positronic Brains then? Seems to me that most were about grapefruit-sized by the descriptions.

Or the calculator pads from Asimov's Foundation series?
Click to expand...

And then there is this;

A Logic Named Joe said:
...

I got Joe, after Laurine nearly got me. You know the logics setup. You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It's hooked in to the tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch "Station SNAFU" on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an' whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin' comes on your logic's screen. Or you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" an' the screen blinks an' sputters an' you're hooked up with the logic in her house an' if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin' Garfield's administration or what is PDQ and R sellin' for today, that comes on the screen too. The relays in the tank do it. The tank is a big buildin' full of all the facts in creation an' all the recorded telecasts that ever was made—an' it's hooked in with all the other tanks all over the country—an' everything you wanna know or see or hear, you punch for it an' you get it. Very convenient. Also it does math for you, an' keeps books, an' acts as consultin' chemist, physicist, astronomer, an' tea-leaf reader, with a "Advice to the Lovelorn" thrown in. The only thing it won't do is tell you exactly what your wife meant when she said, "Oh, you think so, do you?" in that peculiar kinda voice. Logics don't work good on women. Only on things that make sense.

...
Click to expand...
 
Bob Blaylock said:
Computers used to be huge, massively-expensive machines, that filled whole rooms, or even whole buildings. A very large company might own one or two. It seems that back in the day, no science fiction author ever predicted that computers would be otherwise. They certainly didn't predict them becoming as small and as inexpensive and as common as they have become; to the point that most modern households have at least one or two general-purpose computers; with more application-specific computers commonly serving as cellular telephones, watches, clocks, MP3-players, digital cameras, and such.
Click to expand...


Isaac Asimov's I, Robot was published in 1950. Asimov's The Naked Sun, published in 1957, took place on a planet with 2,000 human inhabitants, each owning roughly 10,000 robots, I believe.
 
I Ratant said:
One of the early earth-to-the-moon movies had the spaceship caught up in a asteroid/meteor swarm and get to Mars.
Then the crew recovered consciousness and the high-jinks began... with semi-clothed ladies and really ugly hairy guys... if memory serves.
An earth-moon ship couldn't get to Mars. I knew that back then. 1954?
Click to expand...

But the movie was made in 1950
 
I Ratant said:
.
Stop being so *********** literal!
Do you comprehend the question mark after the date?
Click to expand...

LOL - no I thought it was funny you mentioned knowing that fact around 1954 and the movie Rocketship XM was made in 1950 - so the producer could argue with you - Oh we didn't know that then :p
 
Going to the Moon

Bob Blaylock said:
We sent men to the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but since then, the farthest that any humans have gone has been in orbit around the Earth.
Click to expand...

This is what I would put as number 1 on the list. One thing no science fiction author ever dreamed was that people would make it to the Moon and then just quit altogether. OK, been there, done that; we're done now with that "going to other planets" thing. Whoodathunkit?
 
MG1962 said:
LOL - no I thought it was funny you mentioned knowing that fact around 1954 and the movie Rocketship XM was made in 1950 - so the producer could argue with you - Oh we didn't know that then :p
Click to expand...
.
Actual dialog from the film, as my 12-year brain (then) remembers it:
Leader of the space men.. (weren't any astronauts then), on waking up.
"Where the **** are we?"
Leader of the space men: "Look at the *********** tits on that broad!"
Leader of the space men: "Look at the ugly mother ********** with her."
.
Of course 60 years of interactions with other people might have colo(u)red this verbatim account.
As memory serves, I'd never even heard "mother **********" until I was at The Catholic University of America, in 1956.
 
Ferguson said:
What kbm99 said about it depending on the author is certainly true, some SF made better predictions than others. I don't recall the name of the short story, but I read one years ago from the 50's or late 40's, which took place in the 90's, wherein the robot servent would play his master's favorite records on his built-in phonograph.
Click to expand...

But consider Amazon or iTunes making music recommendations based on your previous purchases and other such "smart" playlist technology.

The (fictional) implementation of that robot was a miss, but the general concept seems more of a hit to me.
 
Tim Thompson said:
This is what I would put as number 1 on the list. One thing no science fiction author ever dreamed was that people would make it to the Moon and then just quit altogether. OK, been there, done that; we're done now with that "going to other planets" thing. Whoodathunkit?
Click to expand...
That's because 1940's and 50's SF writers got the reasons for going to the Moon wrong. They imagined it being either something a lone brilliant scientist cobbles together in his garage, or a military project. Something cobbled together in a garage is by definition cheap and easily repeatable, while military projects tend to take up life of their own and continue on no matter how expensive. Nobody imagined a government project which would also be a race with a fixed goal.

Here is another "Whoodathunkit?" moment. For decades SF writers grappled with overpopulation problem. Many imagined draconian measures governments would have to apply (or would FAIL to apply) to keep human population from Malthusian explosion. Turned out the best way to control birthrates is to give women education, career opportunities, and let them make their own decisions. Who knew?
 
Beerina said:
Flesh sexbots with robot brains. I was certain they'd be real by this time.
Click to expand...
They've been invented dozens of times. But the inventors seem to starve to death before they get around to heading over to the patent office.
 
Mark6 said:
That's because 1940's and 50's SF writers got the reasons for going to the Moon wrong. They imagined it being either something a lone brilliant scientist cobbles together in his garage, or a military project.
Click to expand...

I think there was an assumption that pushing out The Frontier continuously is what humanity does. A definite mistake, but you still hear the same kind of talk from the Mars Society and such. "Space is our Destiny!" yadda-yadda. In fact, home is where the heart is.

Here is another "Whoodathunkit?" moment. For decades SF writers grappled with overpopulation problem. Many imagined draconian measures governments would have to apply (or would FAIL to apply) to keep human population from Malthusian explosion. Turned out the best way to control birthrates is to give women education, career opportunities, and let them make their own decisions. Who knew?
Click to expand...

Malthus didn't. The fundamental mistake he made was that population will always expand, but we find that the prosperous developed world, where choices are available, is seeing declining populations (discounting immigration).

With nearly 7 billion people on the planet I'm afraid it's already too late to avoid a Malthusian crisis, but probably the last one.
 
In fairness to Sci-Fi authors they have to sell their books to todays readers so they have to compromise and put human beings at the centre of their narrative. For instance most Science Fiction stories of the far future tell of humans flying spaceships but most of us accept that within a few decades computers will be flying all planes without the aid of humans.

Even if authors knew exactly what was coming they couldnt base a story on it because it wouldnt sell.
 
OTOH, transhuman fiction, where characters behave in fundamentally different ways from Human version 1.0 is gaining popularity. It is a niche market, but it exists.

One failry obvious example is volutary control of one's emotions and impulses. IIRC, in "Lawrence of Arabia" the main character says "A man can do whatever he wants, but he cannot decide what he wants. This decides what he wants" -- and he pinches his flesh. Well, it seems faily plausible that within a century or so neurochmistry will enable people to decide what they want. Object of your affection is uninterested? Modify your brain so you become attracted to someone who is. Or turn off your sex drive altogether until your degree is completed, as it is an unnecessary distraction. There is SF by now which explores things like that.
 
Bikewer said:
Asimov said that one of the things sci-fi "got wrong" was computers. He had envisioned huge, centralized machines with a large number of remote public-access "nodes" where one could ask questions and such.
Click to expand...

Asimov in particular made a long rant (well, anything by Asimov was long) about a totally silly scenario that he should have re-read and then scrapped: Building on the first reports about superconducting computers (another thing that so far failed to materialize, btw), he got the bright idea that future supercomputers be built in orbit around Jupiter where fluid nitrogen to cool them was easily and cheaply accessible.

Just 3 things wrong with that idea, even at the time of writing:

1) Even then, liquid nitrogen was about as expensive as beer. Cost break-even time for sending even a small computer to Jupiter would thus be a few centuries.

2) Very handy indeed to place a supercomputer somewhere where the round-trip of input/output signals would be over an hour.

3) In space, all you need to get low temperatures is to shield the sunwards side and let your heat radiators look into the 2K of deep space. No need for liquid nitrogen, and no need to go far from Earth.

Otherwise, I think Asimov was a great writer, but sometimes he got carried away just a bit. :p

Hans
 
Another issue about computers in SF is the habit of focusing on hardware instead of software as the main issue in diagnosing problems. So for instance, in Asimov's robot stories, the robot engineers pore over diagrams of the "positronic pathways" of robot brains to attempt to discover the causes of apparent malfunctions, instead of studying lines of program code. (And at the opposite extreme, they'd interview the robots and apply principles of "robot psychology," skipping the software level in between where most of the work in real cybernetics takes place. It would be like figuring out why Windows is crashing on your PC, by a combination of testing how well Solitaire runs and probing the circuits on the motherboard with a VOM.)

This was probably for dramatic effect and avoiding lengthy exposition rather than a "mistaken prediction." Back in the 50s and 60s most readers could probably grasp the idea of examining and fixing complicated "wiring" better than they could understand the nature of software.

Respectfully,
Myriad
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom