A Danish proverb, sometimes attributed to Neils Bohr, states “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”1 Predicting the future is a challenging problem, particularly when dealing with an open system. That doesn't seem to stop us from trying.
Science fiction has a long history of making predictions. Some examples are laughably quaint; robot maids and butlers, a staple of 1950s era science fiction, seem less and less plausible as we make advances in robotics and artificial intelligence—real-world AIs seem much more likely to be task-specific, rather than generalists, at least in current lifetimes. Other imagined technologies turn out to have been quite prescient. H. G. Wells described an automatic sliding door in When the Sleeper Wakes, published in 1899; the first one was installed in 1960. In 1968, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey showed characters using tablet computers in everyday life. I remember computer watches and...