Sci-fi legend Neal Stephenson says it's getting harder and harder to predict the future
In it, the moon splits into seven pieces. Global destruction ensues, as does an adventure with the fate of the human species at stake.
Stephenson's previous titles include "Cryptonomicon," "Anathem," and "Snow Crash," all of which are beloved by nerds the world over.
As one of those nerds, I was stoked to talk to Stephenson, one the best sci-fi writers alive.
One question I was looking forward to asking, given the forward-facing nature of his writing: What do you think is going to happen to human society in the near future?
Stephenson wasn't having it. He explained that he doesn't wake up in the morning looking forward to a day of trying to predict the future. While working in the future is a formal con strait of the genre, he explained, it's not the focus of the writing; the point is simply to tell good stories.
Nonetheless, Stephen's work as been alarmingly predictive of what's come to pass. The most obvious case is "Snow Crash," his notable 1992 novel. A 2013 Wall Street Journal story detailed how big data, virtual worlds, wearable tech, and even the world wide web itself were all forecasted by Stephenson's "eerily prophetic" classic. His 2011 thriller "Reamde" suggests a privacy-free future uncomfortably close to Edward Snowden's assertion that "A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all?."
"We are living in Neal Stephenson's story," venture capitalist Bijan Sabet told the Journal.
But that's not what he's after.
"I didn't predict the Internet or ubiquitous mobile devices, I didn't predict cloud computing," he tells Tech Insider, "and I think that things are less predictable now."
"The instruments of change are more widely distributed among a larger number of people," he explains.
"When the process of innovation is centralized and the tools that are used in innovation are concentrated in the hands of General Electric, Princeton University, and a few other big players," he says, "then it's inherently a little bit easier to figure out what they're working on and what might emerge from it."
But today, innovation is far from centralized. It's distributed all over the place.
The Economist reports that today about half of the adults on the planet have smartphones. By 2020, it'll be 80%. And the cost of transferring a megabyte of data was about $8 back in 2005, but now it's a few cents.
That means data - and the ability to process it - is more mobile, and shared between more people, than ever before. The tools of transformation aren't held by a few privileged hands; they're all over the world, and increasingly so.
"In a situation where vast numbers of people in a lot of different countries have got access to very powerful and flexible tools, then trying to predict or anticipate what those people are going to come up with doesn't seem like a productive undertaking," Stephenson says.
Nonetheless, Stephenson has been one of the foremost sci-fi futurists. He inspired the "Hieroglyph Project," which encourages sci-fi writers to explore hopeful scenarios. In a 2011 essay, Stephen wrote that such imagination can inspire people to work toward shared - though still hypothetical - goals, like the robots imagined by Isaac Asimov, the rockets imagined by Robert Heinlein, or the cyberspace imagined by Wiliam Gibson.
Good science fiction "supplies a plausible, fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality in which some sort of compelling innovation has taken place," Stephenson wrote. "A good [science-fiction] universe has a coherence and internal logic that makes sense to scientists and engineers ... such icons serve as hieroglyphs - simple, recognizable symbols on whose significance everyone agrees."