Welcome to the Future⁠↗

That was the future I grew up expecting — a neon-drenched, mostly earthbound world where humans would mingle with robots, escape into digital fantasies, and modify their bodies. Instead of bold space explorers firing ray guns at alien conquerors, the heroic figures of my fantasies were hackers and street samurai, battling the nefarious plots of shadowy corporations, insane billionaires, and dystopian surveillance states. Unlike my parents, I actually lived to see the future I imagined as a kid. Beginning in the 2010s, and accelerating in the 2020s, reality began to conform to the cyberpunk visions I grew up with.

Though I’ll still go back and read some stuff from the 80s and 90s, I stopped reading new cyberpunk about a decade ago. Around that time it became clear that the pace of real technological change had overtaken authors’ imaginations; newly written cyberpunk fiction began to feel retrofuturistic, like someone writing about the present and getting it wrong. Meanwhile all I had to do to see fantastic techno-futures unfold around me was to read the news.

But if robots and drones are bringing cyberpunk to life in the streets around us, the advent of AI has turned the online space weirder than any except the most creative among us could have imagined

The future I expected to live in arrived, right on schedule, and I got to live in it. Not since the days of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne have science fiction fans gotten to live to see their dreams come alive like this. That’s pretty amazing, if you think about it. For that world to materialize required a lot of key breakthrough inventions — deep learning, generative AI, lithium-ion batteries, rare-earth magnets, and others — that were in no way preordained. The cyberpunk writers got very lucky — and they also probably got some help from technologists themselves, who strove to create the wonders they read about as kids.

Cyberpunk worlds are not necessarily fun ones to live in, even if you’re an ace hacker with a trenchcoat and mirrorshades.

Of course, being humans, we’ll do our best to fight against all of these modern challenges, just like we fought against the totalitarian governments, cult-like mass movements, pollution and alienation of the 20th century. But unlike in a Hollywood movie, there’s no guarantee we’ll win that struggle. Despite our best efforts, the Future might end up being just as gritty, chaotic, and nihilistic as the cyberpunks’ darker visions. We just don’t know yet. We lived to see the Future, but there’s always another future that comes after that.