SciFi movies that have/will accurately portray the future?

That's actually how it should be, because the test is scored relative to what is typical for people in your age bracket.

For example, a 3-year old who can fluently read an 8th grade level text is probably very gifted, while a 45 year old who can do the same thing is probably of typical (or possibly even below-typical) intelligence. (Intelligence relative to decoding, to be specific). So it makes sense that the 3 year-old's score should be higher than the 45 year-old's score, despite them performing the same task.

Now, that said, IQ tests are a frustration in my job, because for students to qualify for special education services and interventions there must be a demonstrable gap between their IQ (which in theory represents their potential) and their actual performance. While the team and I have almost always found a way to get services for students---and usually they do qualify---sometimes kids don't and it makes me upset knowing the support they receive is limited and they don't get the legal protections afforded by an official IEP or 504. It is not uncommon for me to flag students for support, only to find out they were flagged much younger but did not qualify.

As for film portraying the future, a lot of the dynamics in After Yang felt very correct. Not necessarily whatever the science is that creates the cyborg, but also the emotional connection that people will feel toward AI beings as they become more and more realistic simulations of real people.

A Classic Scam

Another Classic Scam

Create a genre of art that makes predictions about the future. Pick an aspect of reality and change it. Remove it. Alter it. Magnify it. Bop it. Insert movie man voice "IN A WORLD..." The independent variable can be a social aspect (a world without privacy, a world without property), an aspect of nature (a world underwater, a world with low fertility), or a technological advancement (intelligent robots, we've cracked immortality) and there you go. Spitball commonsense results of ridiculously high, low, altered "X" (e.g., in a world with practical immortality but limited resources, time would become money) and BOOM, you've got a story. Make a lot of these films with an arrangement of tweaks on popular independent variables. By happenstance, some of these predictions will be correct in some interesting ways. The ways they get it wrong will be forgiven for not seeing the whole future and for allegorical hyperbole, and so on. The films that get it right will be praised as visionary achievements. Prolific science fiction authors who make a fair share of lucky guesses will be treated like a modern-day Nostrodamus and interviewers will ask these oracles to make more guesses in popular interviews.

There is a twist here, however, that the gambling scam does not enjoy. The story-teller is a reality creator. Popular fiction can create self-fulfilling prophecies ("Hey, it would be cool to have a hand-held TV screen!") and preframe evaluative judgements (we've already seen it a thousand times, so we judge reality by our inductions made from science fiction). Thus, you get to enjoy a bit the "not real communism" fallacy here. If your future has not arrived yet (e.g., warp drive), you can console yourself in the "knowledge" that this is simply a prophecy that has not yet come to pass (thus waiting for warp drive is like waiting for the second-coming of Christ).

Sci-Fi movies aiming to predict the future are indeed fascinating! While some movies have attempted to predict the future accurately, it's vital to recall that forecasting the future with absolute precision remains elusive. These movies serve as intriguing windows into potentially unforeseen scenarios, inspiring our imagination and innovation. They challenge us to reflect on the consequences and influence our destiny. Rather than aiming for accuracy, let's embrace the speculativeistic nature of the films, which can spark our curiosity while propelling us to imagine a future that surpasses even the most imaginative Sci-Fi stories. BCFB is a great reminder that the future holds endless potential.

AI much?

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What are you talking about? Look at all those silkly smooth, college-student-making-word-count transitions. Could a robot write such a compelling, enthusiastic topic sentence as: "Sci-Fi movies aiming to predict the future are indeed fascinating!"

Cronenberg's Videodrome also feels increasingly plausible. I was going to put a caveat on my post restricting my prediction just to the elements of the film involving the relationships to TV/media (especially those regarding sex and violence), but, thinking about it more, the idea of biomorphic weapons and bodily inputs for technological devices (and likely control mechanisms) seems eerily prescient.

Good one.

It's interesting to go back to old movies and other sci-fi, see what they predicted and often, see just how wrong they were. On the one hand, we should have speed-of-light travel by now, but on the other we should live in an facist, techno-state by now. 1984 contains its own time line, as does 2001, A Space Odyssey, both seriously wrong, and The Forbidden Planet has us making speed of light voyages a couple centuries out while we're completely nowhere on that. The grandmother of sci-fi, Mary Shelley, seemed to tell us in Frankenstein, that we'd have home-made sentient monsters quite a while ago and H G Wells suggested that we'd have anti-gravity paint in The First Men in the Moon.

Most sci-fi tells us about things we'd either like to do or seriously avoid, but only sometimes does that ever happen. I enjoy sci-fi, but don't depend on it for investment advice.

I believe the movies Things To Come (1936) and The Time Machine (1960) both depicted flat screen TV's before such a thing was even imagined. (TV's were imagined and existed, but the flat screen was decades away.)

Flat screen TV's seem like low-hanging fruit to me. If you look at the first prototype of something like an electronic, moving-image screen (1930's), extending that basic technology with larger screens, higher resolution and color (how about 3D?) is pretty obvious as the next steps. There's no conceptual leap from a small BW glass TV to a big screen, just increments of technology over a number of years, kinda like milk that lasts 2 weeks in the refrigerator.

Ironically, a lot of the effort in Sci-Fi has centered around either faster ways of going further (like outer space), or easier means of destroying things. Bigger threats, strange worlds, other civilizations, and unknown creatures are obvious parts of that.

Sci-fi that predicts things like microwave ovens or even cell phones, doesn't have the same built in drama.

My favorite among sci-fi monsters was in the Forbidden Planet, where it's "monsters from the id", and in which it's us that makes up the monsters.

The Matrix 1999 is perhaps the most realistic prediction of the future ever: people living in a virtual world while connected to machines is exactly what happened.

While movies with space stuff like 2001, Star Wars, etc, did not pan out very well so far: While space technology was developing fast in the 60s and 70s people projected that by now many people would be living in space instead there is no robust indication that mankind is in the direction become a true spacefaring species in the near future.

The most unbelievable thing about The Matrix is that humans are still there. Humans are not efficient "batteries." The most realistic science fiction future after the rise of the machines is a future without humans. But we can't imagine a future without us, so we can't tell those stories, or we have to create lame robots that see the world largely the way we do (e.g., Cylons).

Most sci-fi that relies on predicting future tech is wrong because it's based on present-tech. It reminds me of how, in that old Disney movie, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, 19th century sci-fi originating withe Jules Verne, the evil steel hulled submarine that preys on wooden warships uses what???? A spear???

If you want back to 1970 and wrote a sci-fi movie where people could have their own computer, it would mean a basement full of blinking lights, thick wires and spinning tape reels. The idea that just about everybody would have a computer that had about as much computing power as a big mainframe back then and we'd carry it in our pockets they'd be astonished. They'd get even more astonished to find out that most of what we use these for is text messages, checking the weather and something called e mails.

Most of the best sci-fi movies I've ever seen don't spend much time on predictions. They adhere to some basic principles of human drama, like how, in The Forbidden Planet, with their light speed vessels and ray guns they are actually telling a story adapted from Shakespeare's Tempest. The story puts you in this futuristic, hi-tech world, but for better or worse, WE are still humans and a monster is still a monster....not that different from King Kong.

I think they reached the limit of prediction and nothing that will substantially wow anyone will ever be predicted again.

Are you saying movies have already predicted everything that is possible?

Or that anything movies might predict (no matter how possible, impossible, inevitable, probable, improbable, feasible, infeasible, or preposterous) will ever surprise anyone in a movie audience because so many things have already been predicted?

I don't think so. There's always something new to be invented and even more to be fantasized, but even so, a writer has to come up with a compelling plot line. That's less about quark-guns or antimatter bottles than it is about how humans are still humans, even with quark-guns. We have a ways to go before we run out of plots.

The movie Strange Days (1995).
Overall I didn't care for the movie, but I always remember the technology it presented... the concept (and its potential applications) was fascinating.

I can't say if the film predicted something we might see in the future, but I do think we are on the verge of things that are very similar (via things like combining A.I. with virtual reality and immersive experiences).

It's worth noting that somewhere in the 19th century, there was a proposal to close the US Patent Office, because everything that COULD be invented HAD been invented. It was Charles Holland Duell, a far sighted guy if we ever saw one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell

I think you can play this game well if you just predict 5-15 years out. That is, you can count on most everything being the same, but also make some guesses about how technology will be dispersed and adapted and what likely "next steps" are.



Alternatively, you can play the game well if you guess by function rather than engineering and materials developments. That is, you take it for granted that the magic will happen and project what the world will be like. For example, Spock's Brain is a bad episode of Star Trek, but it offers a valid projection of a future where machines do so much work that human intelligence and purpose regresses, which is pretty much on the mark for human beings who can't count change, read an analog clock depend on Google for their "knowledge," and for the most part stay distracted by blinking apps on electronic devices (e.g., Star Trek predicted Idiocracy in the 60s).



You are right that it is amusing to see the guesses that are spot on alongside the glaring misses (e.g., spears on a metal sub). In science fiction, I remember when the ships were all made of metal plates or some sort with the bilateral symmetry of a terrestrial craft (for which "up" and "down" are discrete directions). At some point, writers got wiser and started imagining biological and organic ships and started imaging the utility of drones for repairs, recon, and assault.