Back to the Future Books

June 25, 2009 8:46 AM

Do you know of any old books which predicted (correctly or incorrectly) 'future' advances and applications of emergent technology?

I just got a wonderful old book. Giant Brains: Machines that Think (1949). This is an early treatise on computers and their potential for the 'future'. I'm looking for other non-fiction, (similar to Popular Science/Mechanics) books written by early pioneers of research and development. Thanks!

posted by Pennyblack to technology (19 comments total)

Being Digital - Nicholas Negroponte
posted by ddaavviidd at 8:49 AM on June 25 [1 favorite]

Vannevar Bush wrote an essay for the Atlantic in July 1945, which presaged cheap photocopies, fax machines, and the internet.

And you can read it online.
posted by General Tonic at 8:50 AM on June 25

Ray Kurzweil's The Age Of Intelligent Machines

On the WikiP:

Arguably, Kurzweil gained a large amount of credibility as a futurist from his first book The Age of Intelligent Machines. Written from 1986 to 1989 and published in 1990, it forecast the demise of the Soviet Union due to new technologies such as cellular phones and fax machines disempowering authoritarian governments by removing state control over the flow of information. In the book Kurzweil also extrapolated preexisting trends in the improvement of computer chess software performance to predict correctly that computers would beat the best human players by 1998...
posted by foooooogasm at 8:50 AM on June 25

Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib" was surprisingly prescient.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 8:54 AM on June 25

Not sure if this is early enough for you, but in Design of Everyday Things (originally published as Psychology of Everyday Things), Don Norman describes a device that would be really convenient--a pocket-sized computer one could use for communication, personal computing, etc. When I read it, I thought "Haha, he's just being cute--he obviously means smartphones." Except the book was published in 1988.
posted by Meg_Murry at 9:05 AM on June 25

I'm not just looking for books about computers. Any science, any machine is welcome. I've seen a few amazing articles about television which were written in the 40's. Futuristic fabulists are fun, but real substance-filled material written by genuine experts are pretty incredible.
posted by Pennyblack at 9:20 AM on June 25

This might want to be an Ask of its own, but I'm pretty sure I remember a few sci fi short stories that predicted future machines pretty well.

I remember hearing about one by HG Wells, in which he could describe a helicopter with reasonable prescience but couldn't fathom the idea of women wearing pants.
posted by SaharaRose at 9:35 AM on June 25

Well, if you're going to mention Wells, you have to take a look at Jules Verne.

From Wikipedia:

"Jules Verne's novels have been noted for being startlingly accurate anticipations of modern times. Paris in the 20th Century is an often cited example of this as it arguably describes air conditioning, automobiles, the Internet, television, and other modern conveniences very similar to their real world counterparts.

Another example is From the Earth to the Moon, which is uncannily similar to the real Apollo Program, as three astronauts are launched from the Florida peninsula and recovered through a splash landing. In the book, the spacecraft is launched from "Tampa Town"; Tampa, Florida is approximately 130 miles from NASA's actual launching site at Cape Canaveral.[8]

In other works, Verne predicted the inventions of helicopters, submarines, projectors, jukeboxes, and other later devices.

He also predicted the existence of underwater hydrothermal vents that were not discovered until years after he wrote about them."
posted by litterateur at 10:08 AM on June 25

J.C.R. Licklider wrote a paper in the late sixties called, "The Computer as Communications Device(pdf)" that lays out a lot of the ideas about the Internet, email, online communities and teleconferencing that are pretty close to the way they turned out.
posted by octothorpe at 10:25 AM on June 25

John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, Stand on Zanzibar, and Shockwave Rider are predictive of the Web, and one of them predicts the proliferation of video cameras, and other things I've forgotten. Excellent writer, often considered to be pre-cyberpunk.
posted by theora55 at 10:29 AM on June 25

Book of Predictions
Not book: Predictions of the Year 2000 from the 1900 Ladies' Home Journal
A series commenting on the predictions in a book called Future Stuff
posted by Zed at 10:37 AM on June 25

Murray Leinster predicted the internet & personal computers in "A Logic Named Joe."

Vernor Vinge wrote a novel (novella?) that Cory Doctorow has repeatedly mentioned as extremely prescient. I think it was a story from the 70's or early 80's but I'm not sure. I've never read it and can't find the name easily. Vince also wrote "Rainbows End" which looks to be very prescient, though the results haven't happened yet.
posted by thekiltedwonder at 10:47 AM on June 25

I've never been quite sure what he was predicting, but Megatrends is another example.

Most of George Soros' books claim to teach his science of financial prescience called "reflexology."
posted by Antidisestablishmentarianist at 11:09 AM on June 25

Francis Bacon The New Atlantis
posted by Abiezer at 11:19 AM on June 25

Engineers dreams by willy ley suggested building an inland sea in Africa in 1954.
posted by mearls at 12:35 PM on June 25

Arthur C. Clarke predicted satellite communications, among other things. I also vaguely remember reading that something he wrote ended up directly influencing the design of the ISS, but I can't remember what.
posted by timoni at 2:03 PM on June 25

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. cf Interlace tech.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:18 PM on June 25

The Wired Society by James Martin
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 2:40 PM on June 25

The question made me think of Kurzweil as well, as Newsweek did an article on him in the May 25th issue (the first edition of their makeover, with the "Obama on Obama" cover story. Due to the "artistic" layout of the article, I thought it some multi-page ad at first.)

The print version includes an inset listing some of the hits and misses of his predictions, and Kurzweil himself had a letter to the editor published later, disputing that a lot of his misses were called prematurely, and a lot of his hits were left out. But he didn't raise any anger over how much of a kook the article made him out to be. Unless of course that part of his letter was left out.
posted by TheSecretDecoderRing at 11:52 PM on June 25