Noahpinion

The years of my youth must have been such a disappointment for sci-fi fans of my parents’ generation. They were raised on stories of spaceships soaring between the stars, and they grew up to see the space shuttle explode and humankind abandon the moon. They grew up expecting flying cars and robot servants, but as they reached middle age they were still trundling along the ground and doing their own laundry.

Though I’ll still go back and read some stuff from the 80s and 90s, I stopped reading new cyberpunk about a decade ago. Around that time it became clear that the pace of real technological change had overtaken authors’ imaginations; newly written cyberpunk fiction began to feel retrofuturistic, like someone writing about the present and getting it wrong. Meanwhile all I had to do to see fantastic techno-futures unfold around me was to read the news.

There are plenty of other ways in which new technologies might lead to dystopian outcomes. Beyond the obvious ones — rogue AGI and bioterrorism — there’s the possibility that modern technology might make replacement-level fertility impossible, leading to a grim, gray, shrinking world where working people have to toil ever longer and harder to support vast armies of the aged. Smartphones equipped with social media might also be leading to an epidemic of depression, loneliness, and reduced cognitive skills.