Indistinguishable

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

I've been reading William Gibson's Neuromancer again, after some 30 years. I spend a lot of time staring at screens of one sort or another, and have always found paper to be a good way to unwind. The novel is part of the founding canon of the science-fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk, and I'd originally read it because I'd become interested in a running a campaign for the Cyberpunk tabletop roleplaying game (now in its fourth iteration).

Now that I live in the Dark Future, I find Neuromancer to be interesting in its outlook on technology. The post something-53 ("It's [an AI] got limited Swiss citizenship under their equivalent of the Act of '53.") setting of the novel has a technological base that can only be described as "disjointed." While cellular telephony was present in the early 1980s, it was pretty cutting edge at the time, and so there are no cell phones, as such, in Neuromancer. But at the same time, the mercenary Molly is outfitted with a full broadcast simstim setup that allows protagonist Case to have the sensation of being her, from miles away, and it clearly operates on some sort of radio signal, since the gang fixer Larry can tell not only that it's there, but that it's in use, even though it's strictly a one-way connection. And pay telephones are still a thing. Given where we are in 2025, it seems strangely anachronistic, in the same way that the decidedly analog future of Alien, et al does.

On the other hand, some of the technology seems, quite simply, magical. The character of Peter Riviera can simply project illusions into the visual fields of people around him, out to an undefined distance. "What he imagines, you see," as another character puts it. This due to implanted "silicon," and while it may be rare, it's not unique... the character describing the effect has seen the schematics for the implants. Riviera is basically an expensive entertainer, but the ability to project holograms like this would be a capability with a wide range of applications, licit and otherwise. But strangely, simple communication doesn't appear to be one of them. Likewise, Case is able to surf the net, via a fully virtual reality interface, from a tugboat in space. That's a remarkable amount of bandwidth, and something that seems magical, given the lack of more pedestrian uses for the technology.

All in all, it's shaping up to be an interesting read, as much for assessing the accuracy of Mr. Gibson's portrayal of "the future" as for the actual storyline of the novel. Which, oddly, I'm not very compelled by. (But I am curious as to how a Gibson-esque telling of the main storyline from Cyberpunk 2077 would go.)

But it serves to illustrate that predicting the future is difficult, in the sense that it's often easier to envision new technologies than to spin out where current ones will go.