[lowglow]

(My comment will get buried because I'm flagged but whatever)

I had drinks with a bunch of Hugo award winners and candidates a couple of years back (2015?) and we started talking about near-future stuff. Mainly that I was looking for more of it. (Diamond Age fans out there?)

A funny thing came up: It's getting harder and harder to predict near-future stuff for some authors. I don't understand why. Is it that technology is becoming more and more obscured from the requirements of interacting with it?

Once upon a time, a person had to divine the landscape of network protocols and unix command line to understand the mystery of the internet. Nowadays that tech is just one click or swipe away -- perhaps there is less imagination required to figure out what's happening behind the scene, or perhaps no imagination is required anymore -- things just are.

Maybe we're just inundated with the next big trivial far future click-bait article that the future seems... well always right around the corner and less futur-y(?).

Or perhaps we're at the precipice of something entirely new and incomprehensible. I run a decentralized AI startup and we have an exercise where we try to imagine a world with particular capabilities but it (for a large part of my peers) seems out of reach -- as if it exists beyond a great divide.

It makes me think that whatever is next is either really beyond the scope of understanding, or just non-existent. It's fun (and exciting) to try and think about regardless.

[et1337]

I think tech is hard to predict because it's more about economic and human factors rather than the actual difficulty of research. New tech doesn't truly change the world until it hits mass market.

[codewithcheese]

Daniel Suarez fiction works are very on point with near future while also being fun.

[lowglow]

Awesome. Which book would you recommend?