
Arthur C. Clarke’s eccentric and influential predictions - Hard_Space
https://rossdawson.com/futurist/best-futurists-ever/arthur-c-clarke/
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hliyan
Many people under the age of 40 will probably not realize what an _incredibly_
insightful prediction this was for 1976:

"You can call in through [a console] any information you want: airline
flights, price of things at the supermarket, books you’ve always wanted to
read…

News, selectively; you can tell the machine I’m interested in such and such
items, sports, politics and so forth, and the machine will go to the main
central library and bring all this to you, selectively – just what you want;
not all the junk that you have to get when you buy the two or three pounds of
wood pulp which is the daily newspaper."

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keypusher
It's sometimes hard for me to articulate to others why I read so much science-
fiction, especially to those who see it as just another form of juvenile
fantasy. Articles like this serve to illustrate that the writers who are
carefully plotting out the future today may end up influencing the future of
technology and culture more than they imagined. Clarke, Asimov, PKD, Gibson,
they are all accepted as good writers, but I think some day a selection of
such writers may be seen as visionaries who not only predicted much of what
was to come but significantly influenced the course of that history. Personal
computers were widely dismissed in the early days as impractical and
unnecessary, yet I suspect it was those engineers who had been exposed to some
of the possibilities science fiction writers were imagining for such devices
that saw where they might end up. Once the idea of a globally connected
network of computers became entrenched in enough people's minds, it was only a
matter of time before the problems would be solved. TCP, DNS and HTTP were all
important milestones in that path, but we could have converged on another set
of protocols if things had been different. Good writers can lay out a vision
of the potential in such a system in a way that private business and
government usually can't, because they operate on a very different time
horizon where they can look past the limitations of what's possible today and
imagine what it might become.

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ceautery
I like the inclusion of his "no more cities" idea in this. A short story of
his from the 40s, Rescue Party, includes this concept, where everyone lived
far apart and flew around in their helicopters.

This is also the story where "a thousand points of light" originated. My
conjecture has always been that one of Bush Sr's speech writers cribbed the
phrase from Clarke, but it might just be a coincidence.

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drexlspivey
Saw this on reddit the other day and was very impressed from how much on point
his prediction was about modern computers/internet
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXxyCyDEaEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXxyCyDEaEg)

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caseyf7
Which Arthur C Clarke books would you recommend? Is there a preferred order?

