According to Bigthink, author Jules Verne wrote about gasoline-powered vehicles, weapons of mass destruction, and global warming more than a century ago.
When American financier J.P. Morgan hired inventor Thomas Edison to wire his mansion in New York, his father, Junius Morgan, believed that electric light bulbs were merely a passing fad.
The mechanized era has been predicted by many science fiction works. (Image: Big Think).
In 1903, Horace Rackham, the personal attorney of automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, claimed that cars would never replace horses. However, in his 1961 book The Wonderland of Tomorrow, Brendan Matthews asserted that soon technology would enable humanity to eliminate aging and withstand bad weather.
Science or Science Fiction?
Accurately predicting the future is difficult but not impossible. As Czech writer Karel Čapek, who coined the term “robot” in his 1920 work R.U.R., noted: “Some things about the future can always be read from the palm of the present.” The greater the understanding of science, society, and human nature, the more insight individuals can glean about the future. Numerous books have made surprisingly accurate predictions about what lies ahead.
Classic literary works have successfully predicted a range of modern inventions. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, one of the first science fiction stories to become a reality, foreshadowed the development of bionic technology, organ transplants, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and much more.
At a deeper level, Shelley’s 1818 novel also predicted the inevitable confrontation between science, religion, and ethics—a conflict that continues to this day without a clear resolution.
Talos may be the first robot. (Image: Columbia Pictures).
The book with perhaps the most accurate predictions about the future is Paris in the Twentieth Century by Jules Verne. Verne, the author of Journey to the Center of the Earth and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, is also one of the most influential science fiction writers of all time.
And Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in the 1860s, is particularly prophetic as it addressed gasoline-powered vehicles, weapons of mass destruction, global warming, and changing gender norms.
Looking back to ancient history, some predictions about humanity may date back to antiquity. In her book Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, historian Adrienne Mayor points to the myth of Talos, an automaton created by Hephaestus, as an example of how the Greeks used their imagination to transcend the limits of technology. Mayor writes: “The idea of creating artificial life was conceived long before technology produced such creations.”
From Beautiful Worlds to Harsh Realities
Before the emergence of the apocalyptic novel—a genre of science fiction familiar today—the public was accustomed to utopian novels. Major writers and thinkers, from Plato to Thomas More, relied on the latest political, philosophical, and scientific ideas to draft designs for an ideal civilization.
In the 19th century, authors like H.G. Wells and Jack London began to overturn this long-standing formula, exploring how human development could lead to an undesirable future.
The novel We opposes the mechanization of humanity. (Image: gpschools).
Each of these dark world novels contains echoes of reality. Buzz Windrip, a demagogic politician elected president in Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here (1935), was initially seen as an allegory for Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Today, this character’s populism bears some resemblance to the populism of Donald Trump. In Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report (1956), law enforcement uses algorithms to apprehend criminals before they commit crimes—a longstanding goal in real-world AI research.
The history of the past has shown that many formerly speculative works of fiction have become reality. With the rapid development of contemporary society, science fiction still has ample room for creativity and continues to make predictions about the future world.
