Futurology Quotes

A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.

We not only romanticize the future; we have also made it into a growth industry, a parlor game and a disaster movie all at the same time.

Science fiction writers missed the most salient feature of our modern era: the Internet.

Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge); by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore more honored in their day than prophets); and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.

What I love about Neill's Blomkamp work is that his stories are small human stories. But what's interesting about Neill's movies is that they're set in the future but they're so incredibly timely that it feels like maybe in the present in the next dimension. It feels like it's happening now. The universe is very recognizable, in many ways.

And we should keep our minds open, or at least ajar, to concepts on the fringe of science fiction. Flaky American futurologists aren't always wrong. They remind us that a superintelligent machine is the last instrument that humans may ever design - the machine will itself take over in making further steps.

No serious futurist deals in prediction. These are left for television oracles and newspaper astrologers.

We are both disturbed and fascinated by visions of bleak futures, predictions of what might come if we as a society aren't careful.

Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.

Futurologists have been multiplying like flies since the day Herman Kahn made Cassandra's profession "scientific," yet somehow not one of them has come out with the clear statement that we have wholly abandoned ourselves to the mercy of technological progress. The roles are now reversed: humanity becomes, for technology, a means, an instrument for achieving a goal unknown and unknowable.

Sci-fi always runs out a little bit ahead of reality, right? Automatic doors in 'Star Trek,' stuff like that. It all happened, didn't it, finally?