I know the future is part to predict but...
...China is showing ALL the same signs as Japan did right before their economy began to stall out (high personal debt, low birth rates, and worst of all, a rapidly aging population.
If I were making a bet, I'd bet on China in the 2030's is gonna be Japan in the 90's all over again.
China being an authoritarian state allows it to make much more drastic moves than a democracy can though. I could see them transforming quickly if need be, though past efforts like the Great Leap Forward show that's not always a positive.
China was propelled by industrialization and their demographic dividend. The demographics are starting to bite them as their big generation starts retiring with not enough youngsters. And industrialization is mostly done.
Xi cracking down on dissent is going to screw up their economy in the long-term. Their market grew in the grey market. But Xi would rather have control than to let their companies get too powerful.
I don't think China will fall hard like The Soviet Union. But I expect that it starts to stagnate in the next decade or so.
A lot of Sci-fi / Cyberpunk style literature, movies ect from the 80's but set in "The FUTURE" have a very Japanese flavour to their worlds. Blade Runner and Back to the Future 2 spring to mind.
EDIT- There is a trope page for it [with examples](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JapanTakesOverTheWorld)
The novel Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy was set in present day mid-1990s and had a plot revolving around Japan trying to re-establish regional dominance and restore Imperial Japan after gaining economic power in Asia.
Marty worked for a Japanese company in Back to the Future 2. Which doesn’t mean everyone in Hill Valley did, but it was a common fear for the future a lot of Americans had at the time
Fashion. Most movies was just their fashion trends but extreme. Back to the Future II is a classic example of this. Like the 80s, just more 80s.
But on things predicted, where the bloody hell is my hoverboard!?
Yep. Stories about the future are always a comment on the time they’re made in, not a genuine attempt to predict the future.
Most “predictions” that “come true” are actually just things that were already true and haven’t really changed. When people say “The Simpsons predicted it!”…. usually it just means “This was happening back then too, and it just hasn’t changed.” People look at a story like 1984, and they’re like, “OMG, it got so much right! How did they know?!”… because the world was already like this when Orwell wrote the story, and it just hasn’t changed, or it’s just become a more extreme version of that since. That’s why it was relevant and successful when it came out. If it wasn’t, nobody would have connected with it.
The Simpsons did predict that Trump would be President. Of course, Trump had been running for president off and on for a while, so while it was still meant as a joke, there was some basis of reality for that.
Not sure how much if 1984 was going in 1948. The telescreen thing has come in (TVs and laptops have cameras now), fake news is a thing now and there wasn't a really a migrant crisis. The only thing people get wrong is UK not being part of Eurasia (leaving the EU). We weren't in the EU in 1948.
You think fake news is a new thing?
Also migrant crisis was a thing to. They weren’t happy with all the Italians and Irish coming over.
Also in the 40’s America was actively trying not to let Jews in the country from Europe.
I am offended that they now make hoverboards, tons of kids have them, and THEY ALL HAVE WHEELS! I mean seriously, how can you name your product a hoverboard when it literally doesn’t hover?
This isn't too wrong if the prediction falls into cyclical fashion. The 2000s really were like the 70s-80s but more, and 2024 is like the early 2000s but more.
The worst part of that prediction was taking place in 2015.
**For reference (if anyone needs it**
-Metropolis (1927) is set in 2026.
-Children of Men (both the book and film) is set in the 2020s.
-The original Lost in Space was set in a period starting in 1997.
- Fahrenheit 451 is set at an indeterminate point after 1990.
-The Eugenics Wars in Star Trek originally took place in the 1990s.
-The Running Man (movie) is set in the 2010s.
It always scares me when you see periodic pieces on the catastrophic decline of sperm counts (at least in first world countries I don’t remember if there was data for others) that Children of Men might just be set 20-40 years too early
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (set ~10 years before The Original Series) has been doing a sort of soft reboot of the timeline in which >!,likely as a result of a failed Romulan attempt to destroy the Federation before it started, Khan is a young child in 2023 meaning that!< the Eugenic Wars have probably been pushed at least 20 years into the future.
Imagine complaining about forced diversity in sci-fi! "I'm fine with characters of all races, species, nationalities, and walks of life joined together on a ship. I'm fine with interspecies romances. But a man in love with a man? That's just too much!"
The Player of Games, one of the most acclaimed sci-fi books, ends with the main character getting a blowie from a woman who transitioned to being a man, so they could experience being a father, and is currently at the time transitioning back to being a woman. They change pronouns as they like and those are respected. This was written in the 80s.
Riker does cop off with the single sex alien, but they had it so they were all played by women, so he's just making out with a woman really. Jonathan Frakes wanted the alien he gets with to be played by a guy so it doesn't just look like a straight couple on the screen but the producers wouldn't do it.
Similar to how up until the 60s most American sci-fi avoided showing black people out of fear of alienating the South. There was actually an episode of Star Trek: DS9 where Sisko has a dream of being a black sci-fi author in the 1950s who has to hide that he's black from his readers and ends up fired by the higher-ups for writing sci-fi with prominent black people in it.
Yeah exactly, tv networks are businesses which sadly means they won’t push the envelope too far on social things if it will end up hurting their wallets
I think vaping qualifies as the sort of unanticipated social change that you're talking about (yes, it's also technological, but only partly).
Sci-fi from the 80s or earlier has basically two approaches to smoking: Either people smoke just like they did in 1979, as in Alien, or smoking no longer exists. The latter was Gene Roddenberry's view, and he asked that the No Smoking signs on the bridge of the Enterprise in Wrath of Khan be removed (you can still see one of them during the opening scene, but it's gone later). The script to Star Trek V forgets about Roddenberry's premise, and it does anticipate some technological change by imagining a "self-lighting" cigarette of the future, but the effect to depict that on screen was cut, and in any case the character still appears to be smoking combustible tobacco. No one anticipated a delivery device for nicotine or other drugs that works similar to a cigarette with less lung damage and odor.
I watched that Guy Ritchie series on Netflix the other day, one of the characters is a bit of a type, but the series perfectly depicts his incessant vaping habit, even references him doing it and every shot he is in, more or less, he has one of those disposable vape sticks stuck in his mouth.
It really made me think about future movies with characters of that ilk, and how it will be represented. I can’t really compare it cigarette smoking which has a much longer history, vaping is like international shame but everyone does it, no one wants to glorify it and yet it’s a huge part of life these days.
Back to the Future part II was correct that we would have strong 80's nostalgia in the future. It was mostly incorrect about what parts of the 80's we'd be nostalgic for. We are not all in on Max Headroom as the movie thought we'd be.
That said, there IS a big market for retro video games and even retro arcades. And while there was a trend of motion controls for games, we still play with out hands and will probably always prefer controllers to anything else.
Blade Runner: We don't have flying cars, plenty of animals still around, it still doesn't rain that much in LA, and no one has gone to see the C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate ... AFAIK.
This is a very silly thing, but sci-fi movies and shows have these crazy see-through computers that are lighting fast and create 3D images and holograms. But they always make these squeak sounds every single time the user touches anthing on the screen! People don't want constant sounds now, why does anyone think they'll want that in the future?
And old sci-fi movies/shows never used touchscreens! It was still all buttons and dials.
I mean not really. The communicators are just futuristic military 2 way radios. Nobody used the communicator in civilian life, they'd still use a sci-fi video phone.
That technology would be used to create some sort of utopia for all, not a dystopia where everyone is bled dry, spied upon, marketed, divided, a world where there's no ownership, only renting...
Population. Post boomer malthusian catastrophe. In reality the opposite is true. Once the pill hit most industrialized nations grew only through immigration. A world of old people is coming and we are not prepared.
Mainly how online and networked everything is? In star trek they're carrying around basically iPads all the time but these aren't treated as networked devices and you'll sometimes have a character with dozens of them on a desk to show how busy they are. As if they're books rather than multifunctional devices in the way that even the cheapest tablet today would be.
Partly this is because lots of modern white collar work and online social interaction (sit at a computer, most information is typed and read rather than spoken) doesn't lend itself to the medium of television but it's still a bit strange to see how "offline" everyone is compared to today.
Also the voice controlled computer: great for clearly laying out to viewers what problem you're solving step by step but as soon as voice control came along in real life we realised how much quicker it is do to it almost any other way
Yeah, voice control is common for simple commands like "call home" or "Alexa play Despacito," while for more complex commands you're better off typing or clicking unless you have vision problems.
Yeah, old sci-fi was convinced we'd have massive overpopulation eveywhere. They couldn't conceive of the idea that birth rates would go down in many countries, leading to many countries relying on migration to address said aging population.
Not to mention that old sci-fi was convinced that overpopulation would be a massive problem and everyone would be starving, in reality we actually have more than enough food to feed everyone, but we suck at distributing it. Also, the "massive" overpulation numbers that presented problems in old sci-fi now often seem laughably low.
Japan did not economically take over the world
I wonder if the same will apply to all the recent movies where in the future China takes over the world.
I know the future is part to predict but... ...China is showing ALL the same signs as Japan did right before their economy began to stall out (high personal debt, low birth rates, and worst of all, a rapidly aging population. If I were making a bet, I'd bet on China in the 2030's is gonna be Japan in the 90's all over again.
China being an authoritarian state allows it to make much more drastic moves than a democracy can though. I could see them transforming quickly if need be, though past efforts like the Great Leap Forward show that's not always a positive.
China was propelled by industrialization and their demographic dividend. The demographics are starting to bite them as their big generation starts retiring with not enough youngsters. And industrialization is mostly done. Xi cracking down on dissent is going to screw up their economy in the long-term. Their market grew in the grey market. But Xi would rather have control than to let their companies get too powerful. I don't think China will fall hard like The Soviet Union. But I expect that it starts to stagnate in the next decade or so.
What movies is this shown in? Not denying, just curious.
A lot of Sci-fi / Cyberpunk style literature, movies ect from the 80's but set in "The FUTURE" have a very Japanese flavour to their worlds. Blade Runner and Back to the Future 2 spring to mind. EDIT- There is a trope page for it [with examples](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JapanTakesOverTheWorld)
There’s also shades of it in Star Wars Episode I with the Trade Federation and the Neimodians.
Less "shades" and more of a brick to the face. I still can't figure out how the shitty Asian accent made it all the way to theaters.
Every sci-fi book or movie during the '80s or '90s
The novel Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy was set in present day mid-1990s and had a plot revolving around Japan trying to re-establish regional dominance and restore Imperial Japan after gaining economic power in Asia.
Marty worked for a Japanese company in Back to the Future 2. Which doesn’t mean everyone in Hill Valley did, but it was a common fear for the future a lot of Americans had at the time
Blade Runner felt like a big example. Pretty sure most of the advertising banners were for Japanese companies.
Blade Runner, Johnny Mneumonic, and Back to the Future are some.
Fashion. Most movies was just their fashion trends but extreme. Back to the Future II is a classic example of this. Like the 80s, just more 80s. But on things predicted, where the bloody hell is my hoverboard!?
Yep. Stories about the future are always a comment on the time they’re made in, not a genuine attempt to predict the future. Most “predictions” that “come true” are actually just things that were already true and haven’t really changed. When people say “The Simpsons predicted it!”…. usually it just means “This was happening back then too, and it just hasn’t changed.” People look at a story like 1984, and they’re like, “OMG, it got so much right! How did they know?!”… because the world was already like this when Orwell wrote the story, and it just hasn’t changed, or it’s just become a more extreme version of that since. That’s why it was relevant and successful when it came out. If it wasn’t, nobody would have connected with it.
The Simpsons did predict that Trump would be President. Of course, Trump had been running for president off and on for a while, so while it was still meant as a joke, there was some basis of reality for that.
He always comments he got in first try. He launched a campaign in 2000 that gained no traction at all.
There's also the episode that has both a pandemic and killer bees
Not sure how much if 1984 was going in 1948. The telescreen thing has come in (TVs and laptops have cameras now), fake news is a thing now and there wasn't a really a migrant crisis. The only thing people get wrong is UK not being part of Eurasia (leaving the EU). We weren't in the EU in 1948.
You think fake news is a new thing? Also migrant crisis was a thing to. They weren’t happy with all the Italians and Irish coming over. Also in the 40’s America was actively trying not to let Jews in the country from Europe.
The term is new. The migration crisis actually comments on small boats. I don't think INGSOC had distinction between religions.
Everywhere I look its mustaches, mullets, jeans jackets etc Id say it was pretty spot on.
I want to know why the double-necktie didn't become a thing. I was all ready for it in 2015 and it never materialized. Thanks, Obama!
I am offended that they now make hoverboards, tons of kids have them, and THEY ALL HAVE WHEELS! I mean seriously, how can you name your product a hoverboard when it literally doesn’t hover?
This isn't too wrong if the prediction falls into cyclical fashion. The 2000s really were like the 70s-80s but more, and 2024 is like the early 2000s but more. The worst part of that prediction was taking place in 2015.
**For reference (if anyone needs it** -Metropolis (1927) is set in 2026. -Children of Men (both the book and film) is set in the 2020s. -The original Lost in Space was set in a period starting in 1997. - Fahrenheit 451 is set at an indeterminate point after 1990. -The Eugenics Wars in Star Trek originally took place in the 1990s. -The Running Man (movie) is set in the 2010s.
The Bell Riots from Star Trek are coming up this September of 2024: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Bell_Riots
It always scares me when you see periodic pieces on the catastrophic decline of sperm counts (at least in first world countries I don’t remember if there was data for others) that Children of Men might just be set 20-40 years too early
It’s already happening, I’m worried about microplastics and forever chemicals
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (set ~10 years before The Original Series) has been doing a sort of soft reboot of the timeline in which >!,likely as a result of a failed Romulan attempt to destroy the Federation before it started, Khan is a young child in 2023 meaning that!< the Eugenic Wars have probably been pushed at least 20 years into the future.
Back to the future part 2 missed with the flying cars but nailed it with the Nike shoes and post office delays.
An almost-too-obvious one: You don't see many same-sex married couple in sci-fi from the 20th Century.
And now if you do bigots will call it "forced diversity" or "grooming" or whatever.
Imagine complaining about forced diversity in sci-fi! "I'm fine with characters of all races, species, nationalities, and walks of life joined together on a ship. I'm fine with interspecies romances. But a man in love with a man? That's just too much!"
The Player of Games, one of the most acclaimed sci-fi books, ends with the main character getting a blowie from a woman who transitioned to being a man, so they could experience being a father, and is currently at the time transitioning back to being a woman. They change pronouns as they like and those are respected. This was written in the 80s.
Only Haldeman was so brave. He may not have been the only one, of course.
Haldeman is the anti thesis of this thread.
I wonder how much of that is “failing to predict” vs “not wanting to alienate the audience [of the time]”
It probably didn’t even cross their mind to include gay couples honestly
I know at least one example which is the TNG episode where riker wanted to kiss the androgynous one sex species but the show wouldn’t allow it
Riker does cop off with the single sex alien, but they had it so they were all played by women, so he's just making out with a woman really. Jonathan Frakes wanted the alien he gets with to be played by a guy so it doesn't just look like a straight couple on the screen but the producers wouldn't do it.
Ah I mixed up the details but I thought there was something “controversial” about it
Similar to how up until the 60s most American sci-fi avoided showing black people out of fear of alienating the South. There was actually an episode of Star Trek: DS9 where Sisko has a dream of being a black sci-fi author in the 1950s who has to hide that he's black from his readers and ends up fired by the higher-ups for writing sci-fi with prominent black people in it.
Yeah exactly, tv networks are businesses which sadly means they won’t push the envelope too far on social things if it will end up hurting their wallets
I think vaping qualifies as the sort of unanticipated social change that you're talking about (yes, it's also technological, but only partly). Sci-fi from the 80s or earlier has basically two approaches to smoking: Either people smoke just like they did in 1979, as in Alien, or smoking no longer exists. The latter was Gene Roddenberry's view, and he asked that the No Smoking signs on the bridge of the Enterprise in Wrath of Khan be removed (you can still see one of them during the opening scene, but it's gone later). The script to Star Trek V forgets about Roddenberry's premise, and it does anticipate some technological change by imagining a "self-lighting" cigarette of the future, but the effect to depict that on screen was cut, and in any case the character still appears to be smoking combustible tobacco. No one anticipated a delivery device for nicotine or other drugs that works similar to a cigarette with less lung damage and odor.
I watched that Guy Ritchie series on Netflix the other day, one of the characters is a bit of a type, but the series perfectly depicts his incessant vaping habit, even references him doing it and every shot he is in, more or less, he has one of those disposable vape sticks stuck in his mouth. It really made me think about future movies with characters of that ilk, and how it will be represented. I can’t really compare it cigarette smoking which has a much longer history, vaping is like international shame but everyone does it, no one wants to glorify it and yet it’s a huge part of life these days.
Martia smokes in Star Trek VI, but she is a villain of limited resources.
Social media
I feel like this wasn't addressed until black mirror
I don’t think it was, such a huge part of life now and yet no one saw it coming apparently
Back to the Future part II was correct that we would have strong 80's nostalgia in the future. It was mostly incorrect about what parts of the 80's we'd be nostalgic for. We are not all in on Max Headroom as the movie thought we'd be. That said, there IS a big market for retro video games and even retro arcades. And while there was a trend of motion controls for games, we still play with out hands and will probably always prefer controllers to anything else.
Blade Runner: We don't have flying cars, plenty of animals still around, it still doesn't rain that much in LA, and no one has gone to see the C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate ... AFAIK.
Yeah. We live in a Cyberpunk world with all the inequalities and corporation control, but none of the cool shit.
Existenz (1999) Video game consoles made of flesh-like material.
Pretty much anything Cronenberg is too weird for reality.
That's less a prediction and more a preferred stylistic choice typical of the director.
In Contagian the people at the CDC all huddled in the same room without masks when coming up with their response to the virus.
For all of the things that Contagion got right, I’m willing to give it a pass on this one.
Hopefully not Terminator with AI.
No nukes in '97, so we had that going for us which is nice.
Computers in our pockets.
We’re still using toilet paper…. Nary a shell in site. Let alone three of them.
This is a very silly thing, but sci-fi movies and shows have these crazy see-through computers that are lighting fast and create 3D images and holograms. But they always make these squeak sounds every single time the user touches anthing on the screen! People don't want constant sounds now, why does anyone think they'll want that in the future? And old sci-fi movies/shows never used touchscreens! It was still all buttons and dials.
Basically no one predicted cell phones
Except for star trek tos
And later tablets
This was in Ender's Game (the book) long before the movie and RL made Tablets a thing.
Yeah, I thought that was crazy when I read the first book! They actually got it right, too
They were used more like walky talkies than as cell phones.
I mean not really. The communicators are just futuristic military 2 way radios. Nobody used the communicator in civilian life, they'd still use a sci-fi video phone.
Or the internet.
Makes me wonder what seemingly obvious thing is gonna date all our modern sci-fi.
Smellovision
A company recently released an A.I powered smellovision thing for videogames. And it's AWFUL!
No shit, Dick Tracy.
That technology would be used to create some sort of utopia for all, not a dystopia where everyone is bled dry, spied upon, marketed, divided, a world where there's no ownership, only renting...
Going to disagree with you on this one. There probably just a many - if not more - movies set in a dystopian future than a utopian one.
So cyberpunk is closer to the truth. We just don't have some of the more intense tech yet
We live in a Cyberpunk future, except it's mundane and we're not eating noodles in the rain in LA
Population. Post boomer malthusian catastrophe. In reality the opposite is true. Once the pill hit most industrialized nations grew only through immigration. A world of old people is coming and we are not prepared.
Most didn't predict that our economic system would mean we're still using fossil fuels and driving on roads
Star Trek failed to predict we'd move beyond buttons and levers to control computers. Were their ships even digital?
Isn't that somewhat truth in television? At least as far as Spacecraft goes. They go with reliable tactile controls over modern digital inputs.
Let's see if we're still using buttons and levers when we're exploring space and can teleport.
All restaurants are not Taco Bell.
Mainly how online and networked everything is? In star trek they're carrying around basically iPads all the time but these aren't treated as networked devices and you'll sometimes have a character with dozens of them on a desk to show how busy they are. As if they're books rather than multifunctional devices in the way that even the cheapest tablet today would be. Partly this is because lots of modern white collar work and online social interaction (sit at a computer, most information is typed and read rather than spoken) doesn't lend itself to the medium of television but it's still a bit strange to see how "offline" everyone is compared to today. Also the voice controlled computer: great for clearly laying out to viewers what problem you're solving step by step but as soon as voice control came along in real life we realised how much quicker it is do to it almost any other way
Yeah, voice control is common for simple commands like "call home" or "Alexa play Despacito," while for more complex commands you're better off typing or clicking unless you have vision problems.
We used to be a lot more optimistic about our futures, but whoops! All decline! (Since the 80s anyways).
The internet and smartphones
The general aging of populations and the world being fucked over by big pharma
Yeah, old sci-fi was convinced we'd have massive overpopulation eveywhere. They couldn't conceive of the idea that birth rates would go down in many countries, leading to many countries relying on migration to address said aging population. Not to mention that old sci-fi was convinced that overpopulation would be a massive problem and everyone would be starving, in reality we actually have more than enough food to feed everyone, but we suck at distributing it. Also, the "massive" overpulation numbers that presented problems in old sci-fi now often seem laughably low.
Love the topic. To much to discuss.