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Stories From Tomorrow
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/m...2023-s85vdrtzs
Sci-fi writers drafted by MoD to imagine Third World War The year is 2040. A crowd has gathered in Soho to watch the prime minister — a man named Ibrahim Bracknell — deliver a speech. Suddenly the skies turn black, as a swarm of killer robots descends on innocent bystanders. It may sound like the beginning of a film but the scene comes from a taxpayer-funded short story commissioned by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). The MoD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory has contracted a pair of renowned science-fiction writers to create eight futuristic visions of the world. The “enthralling and inspirational” stories are supposed to help the government imagine future threats ranging from cyborg soldiers to post-petroleum wars between formerly oil-rich states. Known as the “mad scientists”, the American authors PW Singer and August Cole are frequent collaborators and have written a number of bestselling books. The pair have close links to United States intelligence agencies and have previously worked for the FBI and the US military….. The collection is entitled Stories from Tomorrow and contains a foreword by Professor Dame Angela McLean, the chief scientific adviser to the MoD. She said science-fiction writers had often proved “years ahead” in their predictions, adding that it was “vital” to consider the threats of the future. “The writers of this genre have been years ahead of their time in predicting the modern world around us, from the internet and mobile phones to the electric submarine and driverless cars,” she said. “Thinking the unimaginable is simply a day in the office for these talented sci-fi writers. Who wouldn’t want to hear what people like that have to say?” https://www.gov.uk/government/public...useful-fiction Research and analysis Stories From Tomorrow: exploring new technology through useful fiction Published 28 February 2023 Contents |
Originally Posted by ORAC
(Post 11393821)
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/m...2023-s85vdrtzs
Sci-fi writers drafted by MoD to imagine Third World War The year is 2040. A crowd has gathered in Soho to watch the prime minister — a man named Ibrahim Bracknell — deliver a speech. Suddenly the skies turn black, as a swarm of killer robots descends on innocent bystanders. It may sound like the beginning of a film but the scene comes from a taxpayer-funded short story commissioned by the Ministry of Defence (MoD)….. |
"The MoD’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory has contracted a pair of renowned science-fiction writers to create eight futuristic visions of the world. The “enthralling and inspirational” stories are supposed to help the government imagine future threats "
I doubt that will impress the treasury................... |
Space the final frontier, these are the voyages of the starship HMS Prince of Wales....
Captains log: Stardate 2092 still in space dock awaiting repairs |
"Threads"
Thread closed |
The vast majority of SF writers failed to predict the most profound changes to society, the Internet, mobile devices etc. Most focused on inter planetary travel and robotics. Social issues rarely played a part.
The MOD would do better to read Tom Clancy. |
The MOD would do better to read Tom Clancy. As an aside….. https://www.pprune.org/military-avia...ml#post6995437 |
Originally Posted by HOVIS
(Post 11393937)
The vast majority of SF writers failed to predict the most profound changes to society, the Internet, mobile devices etc. Most focused on inter planetary travel and robotics. Social issues rarely played a part.
The MOD would do better to read Tom Clancy. |
2065, the last of the long line of RAF pilots sat in the crewroom and drew cards to decide which one of the eight Air Chief Marshals present would fly the last RAF fighter and indeed the last Aircraft in the RAF inventory, the sole remaining tired old RAF F35F into battle.
Such was the pace of Government funding cuts to fund the Scottish reunification bill, the RAF, a force once to be reckoned with had been reduced to a force of a scant 23 men, in the guardroom Station Warrant Officer Smith locked the front gate and headed to the squadron to tow the F35 out of the hangar before heading down to the MT section to collect the bowser, catching his reflection in the mirror he charged himself and ordered himself to have a haircut and report back to the guardroom at 3 pm, once he had completed the refuelling and returned the bowser to MT he set about preparing the aircraft for flight..... That sort of thing?? |
Or perhaps they should have used Dean Koontz. Here is the now famously predictive passage from the 1988 release of his book ‘The eyes of darkness’
To understand that," Dombey said, "you have to go back twenty months. It was around then that a Chinese scientist named Li Chen defected to the United States, carrying a diskette record of China's most important and dangerous new biological weapon in a decade. They call the stuff 'Wuhan-400' because it was developed at their RDNA labs outside the city of Wuhan, and it was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research center." |
Originally Posted by HOVIS
(Post 11393937)
The vast majority of SF writers failed to predict the most profound changes to society, the Internet, mobile devices etc. Most focused on inter planetary travel and robotics. Social issues rarely played a part.
The MOD would do better to read Tom Clancy. Sliding doors now in supermarkets, in the original series operated by hidden men pushing them open and closed. Tablets such as Ipads seen in use in the series Replicators now 3D printers Medical tricorders https://www.xprize.org/articles/medi...real-seriously Comms badges mobile phones and bluetooth the list goes on and on. |
You might find the short story "A Logic Named Joe" interesting, as a prediction of Google search, and other things.
You can find a pdf of it, via google... |
Arthur C Clarke predicting the internet:
The other side of it is that if you inspire kids with sliding doors and communicators and robots that talk then they'll spend their lives trying to create such things. It might not only be about prediction, in other words, but inspiration. e.g. Skynet appears in the Terminator films - quite possible that it will appear for real as it is one of the things people think of as being possible. Even with negative ideas, some clever idiot will be the one to make them real. Another interesting one would be Philip K Dick's "A second variety" which could give lots of people silly ideas that would end us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety |
At the other end of the scale, instead of predicting the future SF writers Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle formed the “Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy" which pushed SDI aka Star Wars. Now that cost a pretty penny and delivered nothing.
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Originally Posted by NutLoose
(Post 11393974)
Star Trek did..
Sliding doors now in supermarkets, in the original series operated by hidden men pushing them open and closed. Tablets such as Ipads seen in use in the series Replicators now 3D printers Medical tricorders https://www.xprize.org/articles/medi...real-seriously Comms badges mobile phones and bluetooth the list goes on and on. |
One of the problem with asking experts to predict future operations is that they tend to be variations of what they know now.
Therefore it makes sense to use people with vivid imaginations to come up with scenarios. Most of their ideas will be the stuff of science fantasy, but not all. It should however, make the powers to be think. Being as they don't learn some things from the past, maybe the future has some use. |
Futurists and I would include Sf and other forward thinking authors have been pretty successful at predicting various things that have now come to pass. The problem is they hardly ever if at all are able to predict WHEN .
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The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Robert Heinlein)
though in fairness, that was really talking about the past, not the future |
Tom Clancy
Originally Posted by ORAC
(Post 11393942)
Who failed to predict the way things would turn out
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