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I was born in 1986, just in time to experience perhaps the most rapid technological development period in history so far. I grew up watching and reading sci-fi from the 80s and 90s, only to see those technologies become real within my lifetime.
InBack To The Future Part II, we see what the world of 2015 looks like through the eyes of the 80s. While there are (inexplicably) fax machines everywhere in Marty McFly’s house, we also see video phones as the norm. Watching these movies in the 90s, this really felt like something I would never see. After all, I only accessed the internet for the first time around the year 2000! It looked like it would happen during the brief days of native 3G video calling, but it never worked.
Now, thanks to smartphones and apps, video calling is pretty mundane. In fact, I now spend more time talking to people on video calls than I do face-to-face.
2AI You Can Talk To
Whether it wasStar Trek: The Next Generation,Knight Rider,or2001: A Space Odyssey, sci-fi was filled with computers who could converse with humans, and seemingly understand what they were saying. The closest thing I could experience growing up were basic chatbots like ELIZA, and I spent at least one long school holiday trying my darnedest to write a chatbot in BASIC.
Progress in this area seemed slow, and then suddenly, in the past few years, the sophistication of voice recognition and AI natural language technology took a major leap. Now I canconverse with an AI boton my phone indefinitely. Not only does it seem to understand what I say perfectly, it can talk me through just about anything. Even Jarvis from 2008’sIron Manseemed impossibly far away, and now we’re basically there.
3Wireless Networks and Gadgets
FromStar Trekcommunicators to numerous 90s sci-fi shows and movies showing people walking around with gadgets that could access the internet or call anyone in the world, the future seemed to promise a distinct lack of wires. Consider that I only got my first cellphone when I was almost done with high school, and that I didn’t get to experience Wi-Fi until I was a legal adult, and you may get an idea of how futuristic things feel for me. Heck, I have a Bluetooth-powered glucose sensor attached to my body 24/7, which I contend makes me a legit cyborg.
My entire house is networked with mesh technology, my phone keeps me connected to the internet almost anywhere I go, and as I write this,every phone is about to become a satellite phone. This stuff was all pure fantasy when the cyberpunk genre of sci-fi was at its peak, and yet now we all take it for granted.
4Virtual and Augmented Reality
To be fair, VR already existed when I was a kid in the 90s. In fact, it was a pretty big deal, and considered the next big thing. Except, it failed dismally, and it’s not like regular folks got to try it. If you were “lucky” enough to experience 90s VR, you were in for a headache-inducing time, if your neck could handle the headset weight.
Yet, while the reality of VR tech was pretty awful, in sci-fi it all seemed so cool.Star Trek’s holodeck seemed like the ultimate entertainment, and plenty of movies showed people living in VR and doing just about whatever they wanted there. Of course, movies likeVirtuosity, Lawnmower Man, and The Matrixfocused on the dark side of this reality-bending tech, but that didn’t quell my excitement.
It would take until 2016 before I got to experience VR for myself, with the original Oculus Quest consumer model. Finally, VR was good, andI now spend an hour or two in virtual spaces every day. I have over 500 hours in Steam VR alone, something my child-self would never have believed.
5Drones
The easiest way for a sci-fi program to show that you are looking at a city of the future is to have lots of things flying around. While we don’t—and probably never will have—flying cars, we do have heaps of little flying robots buzzing around.
Drones are becoming more and more common, and at least where I live there are at least a few buzzing around every week. While drone delivery services haven’t really taken off (ha!), these flying gadgets are finding more and more uses every day.
6Biometrics
80s and 90s sci-fi used biometric scanning quite liberally. High-security facilities would scan fingerprints and irises galore, and defeating these high-tech security features was often a major plot point.
Now, almost every laptop and smartphone has some form of biometric lock, and thanks to AI technologies that can recognize faces, voices, and even the way you walk, you’ll always have some way of being identified.Biometric security might not be as good as we thought, but it’s here to stay and it’s so common we don’t even think about it anymore.
This list could go on virtually forever. 3D printing, household robots, reusable rockets, brain implants, powered prosthetic limbs, and more are all things that didn’t exist when I was 12, but all exist today. I can’t wait to see what comes true next!
