Yeah, I gotta say...I'm hitting that age where I'm starting to be completely flummoxed by tech developments, because I remember what "the future" used to look like when I was a kid.
There were effectively no personal computers when I born. The Apple I (which came as a "build-it-yourself" kit) was released in 1976. Now, there is a tiny computer in EVERYTHING. People carry phones with more memory and more powerful CPUs than the Cray-1 supercomputer.
In fifty years, we've dropped the cost of computing power from $1.1 trillion per GFLOP, down to...
$1.80.My PC at home could have (in theory) have run all the programs, control systems and assorted calculations that sent Apollo 11 to the moon and back.
If I had the money, I could have my entire DNA sequence recorded. In another ten to twenty years, we'll probably ALL have our genome sequenced just because it'll be cheap and it'll allow the pharmacist to turn on a machine which custom-builds a drug that works perfectly for you.
I can fire up Google Earth and quickly, seamlessly zoom in to almost any location on Earth with a sufficient resolution to see where a particular tree or car was when the satellite flew over. FOR FREE.
We have videophones. They're called computers with Skype. And they work well enough to talk to someone on the opposite side of the planet with almost no delay. I compare this to a mere 20 years ago, when I called Australia in advance of travelling there, and there was a distinct 5-10 second delay between my speaking and their response.
As somebody else pointed out, we have cyborgs. Thanks to the Iraq and Afghan wars, we have a surprisingly large number of people walking around today with lifelike prosthetics. They're still not at the point of augmenting over normal human capabilities, but they're certainly a hell of a long ways from the old clampers and hooks.
We have robotic death machines that are piloted from hundreds or even thousands of miles away. I think this is one that really crept up on people without us realizing it. Because the initial drones were just for reconnaissance, so it wasn't that big of a shock. We've used balloons and gliders with cameras in the past. But then somebody thought to put missiles and guns on one of these things, and we were so relieved to have a way to fight without any more friendly casualties that it did not occur to us just what we had unleashed. Which means in the next "big war", both sides are likely going to have drones. We may even have fully autonomous drones. If that's not living in science fiction, I don't know what is.
This is a Canadian-made Aeryon Scout reconnaissance UAV. It's cheap enough and easy enough to use that the Libyan rebels used them during the recent Libyan civil war.
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Topic: Oh cool we will live in a science fiction world someday after all (Read 61362 times)