If this were science fiction …

I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that is 2010 tomorrow. I realised that according to some popular science fiction stories, we should have ships somewhere in orbit around Jupiter by now.

Science fiction stories like 2010 are curious stories. 2010 was set in the context of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union. The movie features the famous HAL 9000 artificial intelligence and pseudo-villain of the story. In our time we have barely left Earth, might be returning to the Moon some day and Mars looks like a destination we might reach in a few more decades.

When it comes to our technology, we don’t really have AI in our daily life but who knows what the military is playing with. We could have a HAL 9000-SkyNet slowly waking up. Then again, we might be a few more innovations away from Google’s various services meshing together and becoming self-aware. That is probably just bad science fiction but the year ahead doesn’t seem to be as advanced as science fiction would have it in some respects and yet, in other respects we seem to have even more advanced technology.

I guess that is the problem with science fiction that is set in the near future. More often than not we get to that point in time and still don’t have flying cars, hoverboards or super smart, connected data networks.

Oh, wait …