Writing a sci fi manuscript, and continuing to fine tune it, made me do a ton of extra research on current trends in AI, biotech, material science, and VR. Like a big refresh.

Not because the text focuses in detail on this tech (it doesn’t), but rather so that I have a general idea of what technologies are likely to come before or after other ones, to create what seems (at least to me) a reasonably coherent future world (with one big unrealistic extra thing I threw in there for fun).

There are a lot of different path dependencies or “alternate timelines” for how the world could look in say 2030, 2040, 2050, and so on. So no sci fi vision can be said to fully predict things. And for example, we don’t fault the movie Blade Runner for not accurately predicting what 2019 would be like in 1982.

But my goal is to be “well-considered.” Plausible. Or at least, plausible in the places where I am intending to be the most plausible.

For example if I read a space opera set 500 years in the future and AI is nowhere to be found, or minimally so, I am distracted by this unless given a plausible explanation. The explanation of “the author didn’t think about it” isn’t good enough, at least for something that big.

What technologies do you expect to surprise to the upside or downside in the next few decades?