Funny how sometimes you’ll read a sci-fi story, one published this year. And it’ll be about some future that’s like thirty years from now, and there is NO artificial intelligence in the story.

Like, you’re writing science fiction in the year 2026—you literally live in the science fictional future with the robots that can pass the Turing Test—and in your imagined future, you don’t even have the technologies that we have right now today!

Here’s an example. A perfectly fine story—I get that the aim of this story is not to somehow predict the future, it’s social commentary on the university crackdown of pro-Palestinian protests—but the story feels a bit glib.

Like…it just seems like the visionary activity that gave us these time travel tropes can also continue to give us new things, new tropes, that will sustain future generations. And yet my whole life, people have been saying that sci-fi is played out, and the best you can do is just play with the tools that’re already in the toolkit.

But I don’t think the activity of imagining what might actually happen in thirty years—a time period that we know will actually happen and will actually be quite different from today—is remotely played out.