It’s rather striking to me the number of things that used to be science fiction but are now large companies (often owned by Elon Musk).
I think there should be a name for the fallacy of assuming that “a science fiction author once wrote about that” implies “it will never happen, or at least not during my lifetime”. It’s more specific than just failure of imagination: it’s failing to note that many science fiction authors work quite hard to write about things that are, fairly plausibly, likely to happen sooner or later — that that’s actually one of the basic ground-rules of the genre, though some authors play more fast-and-loose with it then others.
It’s rather striking to me the number of things that used to be science fiction but are now large companies (often owned by Elon Musk).
I think there should be a name for the fallacy of assuming that “a science fiction author once wrote about that” implies “it will never happen, or at least not during my lifetime”. It’s more specific than just failure of imagination: it’s failing to note that many science fiction authors work quite hard to write about things that are, fairly plausibly, likely to happen sooner or later — that that’s actually one of the basic ground-rules of the genre, though some authors play more fast-and-loose with it then others.