Not to take anything away from John Brunner's 1975 classic, but EM Forster's The Machine Stops[1][2] was even more prescient.
Written in 1909, it predicted (in very rough, general form) something like the Internet, Internet addiction, video chat rooms, and virtual reality.
He also wrote another short story which I consider to be even better than The Machine Stops. It's called The Other Side of the Hedge[3], and while it's not as prescient it's one of my favorite short stories and I would highly recommend it to everyone.
As I read The Other Side of the Hedge (which I agree is better) just after having read Fratelli Tutti[1], the ambiguity of its final possessive is striking.
It's so striking that I've attempted to actively use a second language[2] to reinterpret the final sentence:
Demang me ta finyish leta-kom biya im, im ta du terash ruserux mi fo shelaf fo mi finyish sensa seping biya,
unte detim im du ting, mi ta vide im demang beratna mi.
"The Martian government was directed by ten men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and entitled "Elon." Two houses of Parliament enacted the laws to be administered by the Elon and his cabinet.
The Upper House was called the Council of the Elders and was limited to a membership of 60 persons, each being appointed for life by the Elon as vacancies occurred by death. In principle, the method was not unlike that by which the College of Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church is appointed. Usually the Elon chose historians,
churchmen, former cabinet members or successful economic leaders who could offer lifetimes of valuable experience."
Perhaps it's better to think of us living in a mash-up of all four of his Club of Rome Quartet futurist SF novels.
The Sheep Look Up: pollution-driven ecological collapse and climate change
The Jagged Orbit: corporate capture of legislation and societal violence
Stand On Zanzibar: overpopulation and media saturation
The Shockwave Rider: rapid technological change
Brunner was a fascinating man; I only got to meet him a couple of times before his sadly early death, but his work has influenced many across more than just genre fiction. His role in late 1960s and early 1970s activist politics in the UK is often ignored, along with his autobiographical novel of the founding of CND, The Days Of The March.
> This is a chance to bring up my favourite Westworld scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_jW-C_G6Pk . As a depiction of computer worms causing industrial chaos this is pretty prescient, because it's from 1973, two years before The Shockwave Rider and predating all but the very first signs of self-replicating mischief in the real world or CS research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_virus#Historical_deve... . (It's clear that Crichton the doctor had an analogy to human disease and medicine in mind https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7Dq7vqpGCM .) But it's also a great example of how real life is stranger than science fiction (as William Gibson likes to discuss). In the 1973 future the Chief Supervisor of Delos suggests that the resort is being attacked by a software worm and his fellow engineers find the very concept hard to take seriously; in the present day they'd just groan and ask "do you think it's the Chinese [government]?"
> Also, the Gunslinger vision https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jCDQvNh85Y mentioned in the article isn't just the first use of CGI in a feature film, it's surely also a very early, for all I know maybe the first, attempt to show the "first-person view" Umwelt of an artificially intelligent robot.
Written in 1909, it predicted (in very rough, general form) something like the Internet, Internet addiction, video chat rooms, and virtual reality.
He also wrote another short story which I consider to be even better than The Machine Stops. It's called The Other Side of the Hedge[3], and while it's not as prescient it's one of my favorite short stories and I would highly recommend it to everyone.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
[2] - https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machi...
[3] - http://www.101bananas.com/library2/otherside.html