2001: A Space Odyssey
Space Tourism
Based on Arthur C Clarke’s short story collection of the same name, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation got
a number of then seemingly futuristic developments correct, but the most impressive one has to be space tourism, which became a reality for the first time in 2004 with the establishment of Richard Branson’s spaceflight company, Virgin Galactic. It, however, managed to achieve its first suborbital space flight only in 2018.
The Terminator
Military Drones
The first-ever automated hunter aerial vehicle—US’s MQ-9 Reaper/Predator B—took its inaugural flight in February 2001, but it was prophesied nearly two decades earlier in the 1984 film, where Arnold Schwarzenegger starred as a cybernetic assassin, who travels back in time.
Minority Report
Surveillance Systems
The predictions made in Steven Spielber’s 2002 film, starring Tom Cruise, seem to have arrived half a century sooner. With governments and corporations keeping a tab of citizens actions, both online and offline, today’s reality is not very different from the fictional world presented on screen all those years ago, be it tracking of personal data or receiving ads catered to individual preferences.
The Lawnmower Man
Virtual Reality
Even as virtual reality is now letting us explore different worlds while sitting (or standing) in our living rooms with headsets and goggles, Brett Leaonard’s sci-fi film gave audiences a glimpse of what the tech may look like. In the 1992 film, Pierce Brosnan’s Lawrence Angelo is seen helping a mentally challenged gardener, Jobe, overcome his handicap using virtual reality. That the experiment did not go well, turning Jobe into a dangerous digital being, is another premonition that we may have to be wary about.
Total Recall
Self-Driving Cars
All the news of self-driving cars being test driven, published through 2023, is bound to have a recall value of this 1990 film. Although set in a dystopian world, which thankfully isn’t true yet, the scenes of cars with an empty driver seat may not be a distant sight anymore.
Twenty Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea
Deep Sea Exploration
When Jules Verne wrote about the deep-diving submarine in his 1870 novel, it was classified as science fiction. Today, it is anything but. The Titan submersible, which grabbed headlines after it imploded underwater the Atlantic earlier this year, is proof. It may have been one of the worst technological disasters of 2023, but the fact that deep sea exploration, once believed to be stuff of fiction, has been made a reality is undeniable.
When We All Have Pocket Telephones
Mobile Phones
The comic strip, which first appeared in the British tabloid, The Mirror, in 1919, predicted cell phones. While it is impressive how the cartoonist had the foresight to predict something that came only five decades later in 1973, what the artist also gets on point is how the now indispensable device would be
a nuisance.
Frankenstein
Organ
Transplant It may not literally be a prediction, but it did seem to have prophesied modern medical transplants, which was realised for the first time in 1954. In Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, the titular scientist, Frankenstein, creates a new creature out of corpses, which is then brought to life using electricity.
Archie Comics
Online Classes
During the pandemic, watching students turn their homes into classrooms as they watched their teachers and peers on a screen, seemed bizarre even for the tech-savvy generation. Even more absurd, however, is the fact that something like this was foreseen in a 1997 comic strip.
Looking Backward
Credit Cards
With digital transactions becoming a way of life, plastic money may already be on its way out, but there was a time when the idea of credit cards was deemed fictional, specifically when it was posited in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel. The first credit card came into existence about six decades later.
Fahrenheit 451
Earpods
One of biggest evidence of advancing technology is the shrinking size of the device. It happened to computers, it happened to phones, it also happened to our music systems. First came the gramophone, then the radio, followed by the walkman and MP3 players. This is the age of earpods—the tiny devices that disappear into our ears enabling us to listen to our favourite tunes on the go and also chat hands free. As useful as a pair of these pods are today, one of their early predictions was made in the 1953 dystopian novel.
Stand on Zanzibar
Video Calls
This 1968 classic was a trove of prophecies. From video calls to electric cars and satellite TV, John Brunner seemed to have written the dystopian novel with one foot in his present and the other in ours.
Cyborg
Bionic Limb
When astronaut Steve Austin loses a limb following a crash, he regains mobility after a bionic limb implant. That doesn’t seem shocking, except Steve comes from a literary world that was created in 1972. Bionic limbs, however, became a reality in medical science in 1998.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Audio Translation
Transcribing was a pain until recently. But, now the advent of apps such as Otter, iTranslate and Google’s voice translation has not only made the voice-to-text process less tedious, but also made travelling more convenient by making voice translation into other languages possible. Blueprints for this development, which we today take for granted, can be traced back to this 1979 novel, written by Douglas Adams, “a man fascinated by technology”.
The Eagle comic
Computers
It seems bizarre to imagine a time when there were no computers. That must have also been the reaction evoked by the British comic, The Eagle—in publication between 1950 and 1969—when one of its strips spoke about a futuristic computing device, and got the prediction on point. It went on to also propose that computers would double up as entertainment systems, replacing stereos.
Amazing Spider-Man comic
Prosthetic Masks
Prosthetics are now commonplace in the entertainment industry to completely alter the look of an actor. But before Marlon Brando took a crack at it in The Godfather, Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands and Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour, Dmitri Smerdyakov changed his appearance in the pages of the Amazing Spiderman comics. The notorious villain, better known as the Chameleon, was the master of disguises, and deceived his nemesis by impersonating people with the use of prosthetic masks.
The Jetsons
Home Automation
Probably one of the few positive proponents of futuristic technology, this 1962 cartoon sitcom, which ran for three seasons, showed the future in all its glory. From video calls, space elevators and tablet computers to flying cars and drones, it showed a world where robots were human’s friends. Among its fantastic predictions was also home automation. While we may not have arrived at the sophisticated levels that the Jetsons enjoyed, robotic vacuums, AI-enhanced entertainment systems and smart electrical devices are evidence that we are not far behind.
Dick Tracy
Smart Watch
In the 1990 film, an adaptation of 1930s’ comics of the same name, predicted a device that has become our everyday companion today—the smart watch. In this film, the titular square-jawed, fast-shooting, hard-hitting and fedora-wearing police detective is seen sporting a wrist watch, which doubles up as a walkie talkie and a radio, not very different from the wearable smart device that we have today.
Her Artificial
Intelligence
In the 2013 sci-fi romantic drama, the idea of Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore Twombly falling in love with an artificially intelligent virtual assistant, essentially a voice, was equal parts fascinating and unsettling. A decade later, with chatbots capable of mimicking emotions of friendship and romance, it seems like a natural progression for the technology.
A 1923 cartoon by HT Webster
AI Art
The work shows an artist chatting away on phone, as a machine makes art for him. Webster certainly drew it with his own hands, but it is the text that leaves viewers living in an era defined by AI and ChatGPT, which generate content based on human prompts, mind-boggled. The illustration is captioned “In the year 2023 when all our work is done by electricity”.
Talk about eerie prophecies.
Star Trek
Bluetooth
There are few films that can match the fandom of Star Trek. It is the mother of all science fiction on celluloid. It is also the mother of all futuristic predictions—from flip phones, tri recorders and tablets to video calls, hard disks, GPS and automatic doors. But the most impressive and now indispensable prophecy was that of a Bluetooth device, which was seen in the form of an earpiece sported by Lieutenant Uhura. That phones and headsets could be wireless was an unimaginable idea in the 1960s. No wonder the franchise continues to be a hit even today.
Star Wars Holograms
The sight of a 3d projection of Princess Leia pleading in front of Obi-Wan Kenobi was fascinating in the 1970s, when the first film of the franchise released, simply because hologram seemed like an idea that was too futuristic to be true. Not anymore. The projection technology has become commonplace enough to find use across industries, including concert performances. A recent example is the February 2023 concert in Vegas, where Michael Jackson was “brought to life” with a hologram performance.
You’ve Got Mail
Online Dating
Call it a prediction of social media or online dating, either way, the Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan romantic classic paved the way for modern love, one where people fall for each other’s online personalities before deciding to meet up in real time. While Tom and Meg used the email, today we have dating apps like Tinder, Hinge and Bumble.
The Net
Online Delivery
Who would have thought we could use the internet to get food, clothes and everything else delivered to our doorsteps? Turns out, Irwin Winkler, the director of this 1995 American action thriller did. In the film, we see Sandra Bullock’s character order pizza online. The makers reportedly said it was their way of making Bullock’s loner Angela interact with the outside world. She could choose from a collection of toppings, a thought that foreshadows the development of present-day food delivery apps.