7 science fiction themes writers could explore in new ways over the next decade
// Introduction
Science fiction is often a vehicle used to comment on contemporary society, the immediate future, as well as exploring scientific and technological advancements on the horizon, and exploring how these advancements may shape and impact humanity, society, and the planet as a whole. It’s no wonder then that sci-fi writers often study technology at the cutting edge (which is why they sometimes seem prophetic). They also research the challenges and issues faced by the world, as well as ones that don’t yet exist, but may do soon, as a result of some paradigm shift, technological breakthrough, or impending scenario. This article aims to address some of these technologies and issues that are already here or nearly here, and will become even more prominent very soon. And because of this, they’ll make their way, no doubt, into fiction in one form or another.
// The list
- Artificial intelligence
- Super computing
- Space travel
- Internet of Things (IoT)
- Biotechnology
- Nanotechnology
- Mixed reality
// The intention
This list is intended to be fairly broad but not too deep. Each point is a sample, and is by no means the full picture. It is supposed to give a general idea, and serve as a starting point for deeper investigation. After about 30 hours’ worth of research time and 4 million browser tabs, I selected the areas and ideas that are highly likely to have a significant impact, are interesting enough, and can combine together readily in a way that is plausible to make up something that is more than the sum of their parts (which I’ll try to summarise into a potential ‘story’ — which will be the concluding section of each item on the list). There was plenty I left out, Transport for example, with projects like the Hyperloop having to be left at the station. See the bottom of this article for research information.
1. Artificial Intelligence (AI)
OVERVIEW
Does your mobile phone have sinister, murderous intentions against you?
Probably not. We can be pretty sure your phone won’t try to kill you, at least not in the next decade. But, we’re not going to be discussing the psychopathic breed of AI here. AI has been a hot topic for a number of years, especially with the coverage it’s been getting because of the work of companies like Tesla, DeepMind, and Amazon. It’s being utilised by pretty much every industry from Farming to Finance, and it’s only going to increase. For a full debrief on the AI revolution that’s taking place look no farther than this excellent post by Tim Urban of the blog Wait But Why.
Machine Learning (ML)
It’s almost impossible to speak about Artificial Intelligence and not speak about Machine Learning. So what’s the difference? AI can be defined as ‘the simulation of intelligent behaviour in computers’. ML is a subset of AI, and is when a computer displays behaviours or performs tasks, but has not been programmed by hand to do so. Instead, it is given an initial algorithm and then adjusts itself as it ‘learns’ from patterns of data. It could be said that all Machine Learning is Artificial Intelligence, but not all Artificial Intelligence is Machine Learning. Machine Learning is deployed in such applications as self-driving cars, data mining, image processing, and robotics, to name a few.
WHAT’S ALREADY HAPPENING?
AI in your pocket
Most probably you already have AI sat right in front of you, in your pocket, or someone near by has it. Siri, is a form of AI. The spam filters on your e-mail account uses ML algorithms. Recommendations you get on Netflix are all thanks to AI. You probably benefit from AI numerous times a day without even thinking about it.
Alpha GO
In March 2016, Alpha GO, played a best of five match of Go (an ancient board game) with the world’s best human professional Go player, Lee Sedol, convincingly winning 4–1. This was a huge deal. Even though Deep Blue had managed to beat the World Chess Champion, Gary Kasparov, at chess in 1997, Go was a different proposition altogether. Many experts thought it would take much longer for a computer to beat a human at Go, because it has many more possible ‘branches’ of moves than chess, so brute force alone wouldn’t be sufficient. Often the best Go players say they pick moves according to their ‘intuition’ that they’ve built up over many years of playing, and wouldn’t be able to explain exactly why they picked a particular move. This is why experts thought it would take computers a long time to be competitive.
Driverless cars
Waymo, which started out as the Google self-driving car project, has already racked up 3 million (and counting) on-road miles in its autonomous vehicles. The technology has already been tested heavily in America and October 2016 saw the first test of a self-driving car in the UK. Many car manufacturers are now investing in the R&D of driverless cars such as Ford, BMW, and Audi, as well as technology companies such as Intel and Apple.
IMPLICATIONS
Automation
Within the next decade some industries will be well on their way to complete automation. This will be most notable in factories, in which there will only be a handful of human employees, who are only their to ensure the machines are running smoothly. There is some concern that jobs will be lost due to automation, but this is nothing new, it happened during the industrial revolution.
Driverless roads
The transition to roads that are predominantly travelled by driverless-cars will be under way. The most obvious implication with driverless cars is the potentially massive decrease in driver errors, and therefore a decrease in accidents and ultimately injuries and death, not to mention the reduction in congestion.
Super AI
General level AI is defined is a computer that is as smart as humans. And this is exactly what DeepMind’s aim is — to create General Level AI. The company’s CEO, Demis Habiss, explains that this development will then lead to Super AI, which will in turn be able to solve difficult problems, like a cure for cancer, very easily. Super AI would be a lot smarter than humans. It’s hard to say for sure just how much smarter it would be, thousands of times smarter, almost certainly. Millions of times smarter, maybe. It would be so smart that it could just continue to make itself smarter, indefinitely, or at least attempt to.
Creating a brand new, sustainable, unlimited form of energy would be as easy for Super AI to solve as 2+2 is for us. This, although it sounds great, could lead to disasters for the human race, and could possibly lead to our extinction. On the flip side, it could make us immortal (this is all covered in Tim’s post on AI I mentioned earlier). Of course it could be somewhere in the middle, and be very helpful and not lead to any extreme.
At a recent conference (see video below) some of the world’s leading thinkers, researchers, and builders of AI met to discuss Super AI. Among them was the CEO of DeepMind Demis Hasbiss, Elon Musk, and Futurist Ray Kurzweil, which is a sign that people are taking this issue seriously.
The comforting news is that it seems unlikely that it’ll be within the next decade. Ray Kurzweil, who has a history of making accurate predictions, thinks this ‘singularity’ will happen in 2045. But, if we get closer to creating General Level AI within the next decade (which is possible) then the issues around Super AI will become very prominent.
POTENTIAL STORY
It’s quite easy to imagine how all this could go very wrong for humans, very quickly. Best summed up by an extract from Michio Kaku’s book Physics of the Future: Inventions That Will Transform Our Lives:
In one scenario, we puny humans are simply pushed aside as a relic of evolution … when robots are smarter than us, they would then theoretically just keep producing more generations of more intelligent robots an ever quickening pace, consuming all the resources of earth to do so and ‘this ravenous appetite for ever-increasing intelligence will eventually ravage the resources of the entire planet, so the entire earth becomes a computer.’ How could characters combat something like this, if at all?
2. Super computing
OVERVIEW
Computers have been an integral part of our daily lives for quite some time. They started out as huge, room-sized machines and now they’re small enough to slip into our pocket or wear on your wrist. They continue to get smaller as we’re able to make transistors small and pack more of them into smaller form factors.
One of the focuses that has been emerging in recent years is quantum computing. Quantum computing is made possible because of the peculiar nature of quantum mechanics. Digital computers work by processing binary sequences of ones and zeros that are produced by transistors. But due to a phenomenon called superposition the ones and zero in a quantum computer can be in all states simultaneously. Meaning, it could be a one, zero, or both at the same time. The units of quantum information are called qubits. The result is a computer that can perform calculations 100 million times faster than regular computers.
WHAT’S ALREADY HAPPENING?
IBM — Quantum Experience
IBM has created a five qubit quantum computer at its research lab in Yorktown Heights, New York. The interesting thing is that anybody can access it for free via the Internet. IBM plan to boost the machine into a 50 qubit beast, which according to the company will be more capable than the top 500 supercomputers in the world combined.
Google and NASA
In 2015, after some upgrades, NASA and Google managed to get their D-wave quantum computer (which they purchased in 2013) to perform a calculation in one hundredth of a second that would have taken 100 days with a conventional computer.
99.9% precise logic gates
Logic gates are an integral component in any computer. They change inputs into outputs based on logic. In 2016 a research team at the University of Oxford managed to create a 99.9% precise logic gate. This level achieves the required benchmark needed to build a legitimate quantum computer. This score is also a new record. The key thing here is that a big step has been taken towards practical quantum computing.
IMPLICATIONS
Quantum Internet
As more quantum computers are produced it should be possible to create a quantum network, so that they can all operate together in the cloud. To relay information quantum networks would use photons, which would mean awesome computing power and super quick Internet.
Security
Security would be a serious issue. A quantum computer could easily break any existing encryption methods. Quantum computers, then, would make “the internet as we know it, totally unusable” says Andersen Cheng, CEO of cybersecurity start-up Post-Quantum.
Supreme computation
With quantum computers we’ll be able to get answers to questions in a fraction of the time it would take with conventional computers. This means scientific and thus technological advances with become ridiculously rapid, breakthroughs that might have taken years may only take a matter of weeks or even days.
POTENTIAL STORY
What if a single country had a monopoly on quantum computing? What if just a small group of people had the possibility to leverage large networks of quantum computers? Because quantum computing is incredibly difficult and requires a lot of specialist equipment and resources it may not be owned and controlled by very many groups. We’d like to think this computing power would not be used for anything ‘evil’, but it’s easy to see how these machines could be utilised to exploit masses of people, generate huge wealth, and exert power and control.
3. Space travel
OVERVIEW
It seems like Mars has been done to death the last few years. It’s firmly in the mind of the public with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s bold and awe-inspiring plans to colonise Mars as soon as possible. I can direct you again here to Tim Urban, as he wrote this post all about it. I would recommend reading the whole series, it’s a bit of a beast, but totally worth the investment.
It’s not just some crazy scheme to do something amazing. Getting to Mars could be the single most important mission there actually is. There is a long list of things that could seriously jeopardise our existence on earth, which is why colonising Mars is of particular importance. Musk has calculated that in order to have a realistic chance of colonising Mars there will have to be a population of about 1 million people. To do this SpaceX will build the most powerful rocket that any has ever dared to construct, and it’ll be able to carry 100 people per trip.
Full video of SpaceX’s plans
5-minute video of SpaceX’s plans
It’s obviously advantageous to have the colony up and running as soon as possible, but it’s hard to predict how long this would take. Elon has said the mission to colonise Mars could start as soon as 2022. Conservative estimates would be 50–100 years, but it could take a lot longer, or simply not happen at all. If he were to pull it off, in my opinion, Musk would have made the biggest contribution to humanity by a single person (not to mention what he’s also trying to do with all his other companies). I mean, colonising Mars, does it get any bigger or more significant? Not only is it preserving the human race, but we’ll also be starting to branch out, away from our tiny, comfortable home in our solar system… out, into the big, wide universe.
WHAT’S ALREADY HAPPENING?
SpaceX
SpaceX has a lucrative contract with NASA, and regularly delivers satellites into space for companies. It’s the first company to create re-useable rockets, landing them on a sea barge at Cape Canaveral. It plans to use its Dragon module for its first manned space flight as early as 2018.
NASA
NASA has been working on the Orion spacecraft, a space vehicle for the next generation of exploration, which has been designed to eventually transport humans to Mars. To get the Orion into space NASA has created the Space Launch System, a new heavy-lift rocket that has the firepower to get us farther than we’ve ever been. The first mission to use these systems will be ‘Mission-1’. Nasa says ‘it will be the safest, most advanced spacecraft ever built, and it will be flexible and capable enough to take us to a variety of destinations.’
Blue Origin
The CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, is also keen on space exploration and with his company, Blue Origin, has been making some progress towards the goal of getting people into space. The first target is to get people on suborbital trips by 2018. In October 2016 Blue Origin got a bit closer to achieving this aim by successfully completing an ‘in-flight escape test’. An in-flight escape is what would be used in an emergency to eject the astronauts’ capsule away from the rockets and get them back to safety by deploying parachutes.
IMPLICATIONS
Living on Mars
The first and most obvious implication is that by the third quarter of the 21st Century we could have an established colony on Mars. We’d possibly be able to go on a ‘vacation’ to Mars, or go there to visit family members, or live there permanently. There would be restaurants, schools, and leisure facilities. But we could have astronauts go there within the next decade and possibly establish a long-term base.
Private-sector growth
Space will become populated, and perhaps dominated, by private corporations. NASA will be heavily involved but currently it seems to be the billionaire entrepreneurs that are pushing space exploration forward.
Space Tourism
This doesn’t seem to be too far away. Virgin Galactic has already been successful with test gliding their SpaceShipTwo craft. The projection is that by the end of the century hundreds of thousands of people would have had the chance to go to space.
Technological progression
Getting to space is hard. Travelling in space is super hard. Doing both of these things, whilst living in space, on a mission to colonise another planet is seemingly impossible. These challenges require lots of talent, resources, and concentrated effort. When you combine these elements you often get major technological breakthroughs. So, we can expect lots of interesting new tech for earth as a by-product of conquering space.
POTENTIAL STORY
The year is 2028. Two rival billionaire entrepreneurs are engaged in a space race-style competition to set up a small colony on Mars. Their sites are within 100 miles of each other. They simultaneously begin to send their settlers to Mars in huge transportation spacecraft. The rivalry turns sour when an explosion on one of the vessels, killing hundreds of specialists, is blamed on the competitor, leading to the first Martian cold war.
4. IoT
OVERVIEW
Internet of Things (IoT) are objects and devices that have embedded computer systems and often record and relay data (via the Internet) through their sensors.
It’s not necessarily new technology but it’s certainly growing in prominence, particularly amongst hobbyists who are using single-board computers like the Raspberry Pi to make their own systems and solutions. Industries are investing heavily into IoT as well, the prediction being that in future pretty much everything will be smart, cities, buildings, transport networks, will all have embedded systems and sensors, as well as all household items, personal affects, and gadgets. Clothes, cars, even your dog will have sensors in it that send notifications when they’ve just left you a present on the grass (Ok, maybe not that far).
WHAT’S ALREADY HAPPENING?
Visa
Visa, the credit card company, has plans to be a significant player in the IoT market by expanding its digital transaction platform, Visa Ready, to be implemented in wearables, devices, clothing, and transportation services, amongst other areas. “More and more, consumers are relying on smart appliances and connected devices to make their lives easier,” said Jim McCarthy, executive vice president of innovation and strategic partnerships at Visa, in a statement. “By adding payments to these devices, we are turning virtually any Internet connection into a commerce experience.”
‘Smart Nation’ Singapore
Singapore is on a mission to become the world’s first, truly ‘smart nation’. In 2014 the Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, laid out some ambitious plans to transform the island using sophisticated technology. A vast amount of sensors and cameras were installed with the aim of finding solutions to issues related to the five key domains, which are transport, home & environment, business productivity, health & enabled ageing, and public sector services, as specified by the Smart Nation program. Although Singapore might have been one of the first, there are now many cities with ‘smart’ projects under way.
Intel
In April 2016 it was discovered that Intel, one of the world’s leading microchip companies, aimed to cut 12,000 employees, which would cost $1.2 billion, in order to facilitate more investment in it’s IoT operations. This is a clear indication of where Intel sees its future growth. In a conference call Intel’s CEO, Brian Krzanich, said “we are evolving from a PC company to a company that powers the cloud and billions of smart connected and computing devices.”
IMPLICATIONS
Everything connected in your Smart City
You’ll walk out your house and the music you were playing will ‘follow’ you into the car. In the dashboard you’ll have a display and be able to control any device or system in your home. But it won’t stop there. You’ll be ‘connected’ to your ‘smart city’, sending and receiving information from your devices to give you the best experience possible.
Security
IoT, as it currently is, has already shown its vulnerability. Business Insider have forecast that by 2020 there will be 34 billion internet-connected devices, with IoT devices accounting for 24 billion of that figure. IHS estimates that IoT devices will grow to 30.7 devices by 2020. Regardless of the figure, the fact is that there are going to be a lot of IoT devices in the not-too-distant future. With this growth there will be a significant security risk. As the technology becomes cheaper and producers increase it’ll be harder to maintain security standards. With each person having more connected devices there will be more ‘targets’ for criminals to attack, especially if Visa want their payment platform to be in every device possible.
Healthcare
The healthcare industry is now using IoT devices to improve the quality of service and increase effectiveness of treatment, whilst reducing cost. Wearable and implanted devices are now in use, which means that checks can be made on a patient’s health remotely, without them having to physically travel to a clinic or hospital. As this continues to advance, it’s possible that we’ll all have micro sensors and devices inside our bodies to monitor our health, gathering data, and identifying any issues at the earliest possible stage.
Legal
Early in 2o17 prosecutors wanted to use data from Amazon’s Echo IoT device as evidence in a murder case. Amazon declined to give up the information. There soon will be an insane amounts of IoT devices in existence, meaning there will be an even more insane amount of data collected from these devices, so expect many more instances in which this data could be used as evidence to solve crimes or put people behind bars.
POTENTIAL STORY
Increasing security risks and the threat of both natural and manmade disasters might mean that only ‘smart cities’ will be sustainable, and be prepared to for long-term survival. There could be a small collection of ‘smart nations’ that advance far quicker than the rest of the world, with well-established technology and connectivity. These nations excel whilst the rest of the world lags behind. The inequalities could lead to catastrophic wars and disasters.
5. Biotechnology
OVERVIEW
One of the biggest areas of focus in biotechnology is genomics. A genome can be defined as the entire set of genes in a cell or organism. In 1990 The Human Genome project was launched to crack the human genome, that is, to map all of the genes that make-up human beings, the project was completed in 2003. This opened up the world of genetics and everything that is and will be possible including, but not limited to, genetic-specific medical treatment and evolutionary understanding.
WHAT’S ALREADY HAPPENING?
Gene therapy
A gene therapy treatment by Kite Pharma has led to 36% of cancer patients in a trial to go into remission. 41% of participants have had their cancer reduced to half of what it was after 6 months. The participants all had a blood cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and other treatments they had tried had been unsuccessful. The co-leader of the study, Dr Fred Locke, a blood cancer expert, said: “the numbers are fantastic.”
Growing a human heart
A team Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School have come closer than anyone to growing an entire beating human heart in a lab. Adult skin cells were converted into stem cells by a process called messenger RNA. These cells were then formed into cardiac cells that began to beat when they were shocked with electricity. The ultimate aim is to grow human hearts that can be used for transplants, but before this can happen researchers need to reduce the likelihood of the hearts being rejected by perfecting the conditions that allows the heart to grow in the same way it would in the human body
Genetically engineered biofuel
Sugarcane has been genetically modified by a team at the University of Illinois, so that oil can be harvested from the plant to make biodiesel. It’s anticipated that the new, juiced-up crop be more profitable than soybeans and corn, five and two times more, respectively. “Instead of fields of oil pumps, we envision fields of green plants sustainably producing biofuel in perpetuity on our nation’s soil, particularly marginal soil that is not well suited to food production,” said Stephen Long, Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences.
IMPLICATIONS
All genetic diseases cured
After the work done by the Human Genome Project we could be well on the way to being able to cure all genetic diseases. The issue is that there always ethical arguments to be had around the manipulation of genetics where humans and animals are involved.
Biological weapons
The flipside to the above implication is that biotechnology could be leveraged to create weapons. This is nothing new. But if easier or more effective techniques or processes are discovered for treatments, it also means it’s easier to produce biological weapons.
Growing human organs inside animals
The concept is quite simple, grow human organs inside animals (such as pigs) using some fancy genetic techniques. Realising this is far from easy though, as so far most of the human cells die.
POTENTIAL STORY
A large biotechnology company masters the art of growing human organs inside animals. There is a scandal that leads an investigative journalist to discover that the company is in fact using dogs to harvest human hearts that sell for $2 million dollars each.
6. Nanotechnology
OVERVIEW
Nobel Laureate, Horst Stormer said ‘Nanotechnology has given us the tools to play with the ultimate toy box of nature — atoms and molecules. Everything is made from these, and the possibilities to create new things appear limitless. Nanotechnology is the manipulation of the really small stuff, atoms and molecules. Strictly speaking, nanotechnology deals with matter that’s between 1- 100 nanometers. To put that into perspective… a sheet of paper is 100,000 nanometers thick. Yeah, we’re talking really small.
WHAT’S ALREADY HAPPENING?
Graphene
Graphene is a 2D material only one atom thick. It possesses very special properties. It’s the world’s strongest material, harder than diamond, 300 times stronger than steel, and more conductive than copper. Graphene is also transparent and flexible, so can be morphed into any shape. Using graphene, the world’s lightest mechanical watch was created and unveiled in January 2017.
Composite materials
Some beverage companies, such as Miller Brewing, use clay nanoparticles in plastic bottles to keep the beer fresh by keeping unwanted oxygen out.
Nano 3D printing
Using 3D printing technology engineers at the University of California San Diego have created a blood vessel network that’s fully functional. This work could progress towards the creation of artificial organs to be used in transplants.
IMPLICATIONS
Super materials
Graphene, and the other materials that can be made from it, will lead to the creation of highly advanced and sophisticated technologies that were previously not possible. These ‘super materials’ will have application in the fields of transport, electronics, energy, and medicine. They will be utilised to create new membranes, sensors, transistors, semiconductors, water filtration sheets, and supercapacitors, to name a few.
One example that could be possible in the near future is a ‘smart’ display that is extraordinarily thin and flexible. This would be advantageous in a sport such as cycling. It could replace traditional systems as it would be lighter and could be fitted to the handlebars or the rider’s wrist. Or it could be used to create flexible batteries that could be sewn into clothing to power wearable devices.
Nanobots inside the body
The scientist Michio Kaku has predicted that ‘in the future we will have tiny sensors in our clothes, body, and bathroom, constantly monitoring our health and detecting diseases like cancers years before they become a danger.’
Medical
Nanotechnology will give us the ability to perform treatments and get access to places that are traditionally difficult, such as the brain. It will also be possible to deliver drugs around the body using nanoparticles, as well as specifically target cancer cells, rather than affecting surrounding tissue and organs.
POTENTIAL STORY
A homicide detective is struggling with severe headaches, which he puts down to sleepless nights as he tends to his newborn daughter. A health check reveals he has an inoperable brain tumour. He agrees to an experimental form of nanobot surgery. It appears to be successful, until he has a brain aneurysm and drops dead. He wakes up in the morgue with no recollection of who he was. Tests reveal the nanobots are continuously restructuring his brain, making him smarter. A government agency attempts to utilise his new-found talents with disastrous consequences.
7. Mixed reality
OVERVIEW
Summed up nicely by Colin O’Donnel in an article for Tech Crunch, mixed reality is “where virtual reality, augmented reality and plain-old reality mix together to bring digital overlays that incorporate real physics and computer graphics and create immersive experiences with the best of the physical and digital.”
WHAT’S ALREADY HAPPENING?
Pokémon Go
2016 saw the explosion of Pokémon Go. Within the first month of release it made approximately $270 million in revenue and had 100 million downloads in the Google Play market alone.
Gaming headsets
The gaming console giant PlayStation already offers their own versions of Virtual reality to play games with PlayStation VR. Microsoft has announced it will release its own handset this 2018, to accompany its latest X-box console, the mysteriously titled ‘Project Scorpio’. Microsoft’s solution will be mixed reality, however, providing both virtual and augmented reality.
Medical application
The UK’s National Health Service is providing an immersive virtual reality service called the ‘Blue Room’, which is a form of treatment for children with autism, it helps them deal with their fears and anxieties. It’s based on research carried out by Newcastle University.
IMPLICATIONS
Gamification
Virtual reality will continue to improve, and will be adopted more widely as the price begins to decrease. With the major games console companies already producing VR headsets, it will only be a matter of time before most mobile phones come with a VR accessory as standard.
Augmented-Real life integration
We’re essentially talking about Internet contact lenses here. Babak A. Parviz, a bionanotechnology expert, has already been able to miniaturize a microchip and LEDs. As the technology progresses he’ll “eventually include hundreds of LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye, such as words, charts, and photographs.” The primary aim is to ‘create a contact lens with 3,600 pixels, each one no more than 10 micrometers thick.’ These lenses will be connected to the Internet. One can image many ways how this might be useful. You could surf the Internet, or read an e-book directly through the lens, for example, not needing to hold anything, you’d also be able to read in environments when it might not be possible otherwise. These lenses will also be used for augmented reality.
POTENTIAL STORY
A Virtual Reality headset manufacturer combines their hardware with a psychoactive drug to create the ‘ultimate escape’. The 12 hour long sessions lead the teen anti-hero Alex Hill into a deep psychosis in which he becomes detached, unable to know what’s real and what’s simulated. He ceaselessly attempts to commit suicide to be released from his torture. But in the ‘ultimate escape’ you can never die.
Conclusion
The things in this list have all been done by science fiction before, in one shape or other. But, as we get closer to being able to achieve some of these things, or they become commonplace in wider society, rather than just the scientific community, they will take on new importance and new meanings, so the stories created around them will be new, and unlike previous ideas. These are just some of the areas you can look out for and perhaps seek when looking for your next science fiction novel. Or, maybe you’re a writer and are looking for a new idea or inspiration, and perhaps there was just a small part of this list that sparked something in your imagination.
// Research for this article
Michio Kaku, the famed physicist, wrote a book called: Physics of the Future: Inventions That Will Transform Our Lives. It’s split into 9 parts, each addressing a different topic, like AI for example. Each part is broken into Near Future (present — 2030), Midcentury (2030–2070), and Far Future (2070–2100). I primarily only used the Near Future sections for research on this post, and have only used bits that were most interesting. It was first published in 2011 however, so there have been developments and breakthroughs since then. I used the book as a reference because using a renowned scientist as my starting point seemed sensible. I’ve supported and synthesised Kaku’s predictions and insights with news and research sites online for more information to create this list.
