Welcome to The Future
This time it arrived right on schedule.
The years of my youth must have been such a disappointment for sci-fi fans of my parents’ generation. They were raised on stories of spaceships soaring between the stars, and they grew up to see the space shuttle explode and humankind abandon the moon. They grew up expecting flying cars and robot servants, but as they reached middle age they were still trundling along the ground and doing their own laundry.
What happened in the 1970s that seemed to rob the future from the Boomer generation? Energy. With the end of cheap oil in 1973, and the failure of nuclear power to get cheaper as volumes scaled up, the dreams of the sci-fi authors of the mid-20th century failed to materialize. Those dreams had partially been based on fantasy physics (faster-than-light travel, gravity control, time travel),1 but partly they were based on the expectation that energy would keep getting more plentiful and engines would keep getting more powerful and compact. But in the 1970s, humanity suddenly stopped being able to harness more and more energy per person:
Limited by energy scarcity, humanity’s innovative efforts switched from atoms to bits; “technology” in 1970-2010 was defined by computers, software, and the internet. In 2011, Paul Krugman and Tyler Cowen were writing that the appliances in their kitchen hadn’t changed since they were children.
Science fiction writers anticipated this shift quite early on. The “cyberpunk” writers of the 1980s and 1990s — William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Masamune Shirow, Bruce Sterling, Mike Pondsmith, Kojima Hideo, Konaka Chiaki, Vernor Vinge, and many others — didn’t envision a future entirely devoid of hardware innovations, but most of what they envisioned for the 21st century centered around advances in the internet, AI, robotics, and biotech.
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.
We are living in the cyberpunk future
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.
For the last two years, a giant animated sphere has loomed over the city of Las Vegas, occasionally taking the form of a titanic blinking eyeball:
Open up the video app on your pocket computer, and you can see videos of humanoid robots shooting machine guns at a metal-coated “cybertruck”:
Those humanoid robots are walking around our college campuses too.
Meanwhile, self-driving robot cars increasingly fill our streets. Here’s a photo I shot from the window of my own robot car, of a very different-looking type of robot car that I had never seen before:
It has become absolutely normal to see security robots of all shapes and sizes rolling through parks and shopping centers, mute sentinels with their camera eyes spinning. Police departments are beginning to use robots too — the Denver Police Department has a bomb-sniffing robot dog that also tries to get criminals to surrender to it:
Except in a few cities, robots aren’t ubiquitous yet, but they’re already generating some pretty cyberpunk stories. In Moscow, there were reports of a dog robot that was found selling drugs on the street, and shut itself down and wiped its memory when the police grabbed it . And here was an alert from a couple of years ago:
Meanwhile, the skies of our world have come alive with new kinds of low-flying aircraft. People are getting packages delivered by drones:
And just as the cyberpunks foretold, drones are taking over warfare. Finding themselves at a tremendous disadvantage in men and materiel, and facing a cutoff of American aid, the Ukrainians have responded by innovating furiously in the military drone space. Drones are increasingly replacing infantry, artillery, reconnaissance, long-range bombers, and everything else on the battlefield.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more cyberpunk video than this documentary about a Ukrainian drone pilot:
Drones are currently winning the war against electronic countermeasures, and when they become autonomous in the near future, that battle will be effectively over. Here’s an impressive-looking video (which still falls far short of what’s actually coming in terms of actual capabilities):
(Meanwhile, I don’t know if they’ll be useful, but China has military drones that look like birds — something right out of the opening scene of John Shirley’s Eclipse.)
And the new aircraft are carrying humans around as well. Air taxis are soaring across the skyscraper forests of Chinese cities:
And at least one company will sell you a hoverbike that you can pilot yourself:
Even more than with robots, when drones are involved, the cyberpunk storylines just write themselves. There are rumors that Russian gangs, or perhaps just normal businesspeople (sometimes it’s hard to distinguish) have been using drones to assassinate their rivals. The threat of drone assassination, blackmail, and espionage has prompted some rich people to start installing anti-drone systems on their superyachts.
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.2
The proliferation of deepfakes has caused shared reality to crumble, and have opened up a Wild West of opportunities for political meddling, cybercrime, disinformation, pranks, and revenge. There was the case of the man who used AI to impersonate a high school principal and frame him for making racist remarks. In India’s democracy, deepfakes have become a common, widely accepted electioneering technique. In Indonesia, a political party created a deepfake of the dead dictator Suharto.
Scammers are using deepfakes to pull fake kidnapping schemes. A popular Australian radio host turned out to be an AI clone. Chinese companies are selling deepfakes of Russian women as online companions to middle-aged Chinese men. Researchers from the University of Zurich ran an unauthorized experiment where they had AIs go on Reddit and try to change people’s minds about sensitive political issues.
Deepfakes are only one small part of how AI is making cyberpunk a reality, just a couple of years after the first high-quality LLMs came out. People now walk down the street talking to AI companions. Scarlett Johansson has sued OpenAI for allegedly using her as the basis for a voice assistant. Artists have tried to “data poison” AI art programs using a program called Nightshade.
AI is providing spiritual guidance for Christian worshippers in Korea. Many of Trump’s executive orders were written with AI, and the justification for his “Liberation Day” tariffs was probably AI-generated too. AI has taught the Ukrainians how to make 3d-printed bombs. AI can now figure out where you are from any photo you post online.3
But the most cyberpunk AI story I’ve seen so far is probably when a man’s AI girlfriend was named as his accomplice in a plot to assassinate the Queen of England.
As for body modifications, those are arriving more slowly than cyberpunk predicted. But a paralyzed man has a Neuralink implant that lets him multitask with a bunch of brain-controlled devices:
And an engineer named Ian Davis made himself a prosthetic hand:
Neural interface technologies are proliferating, as are new generations of wearable computer interfaces. Bionic eyes are getting better and better.
It’s not just that cyberpunk predicted the ways we’d use technology. It did an amazing job at anticipating the aesthetics and the feel of a world in which, in William Gibson’s famous phrase, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”
Police can now shoot GPS trackers that attach themselves to suspects’ cars. Homeless people stole so many electrical boxes in Oakland that the city started switching traffic lights to stop signs. The app Protector will let you order an armed security team to wherever you are — basically, Uber for street samurai. Chinese government officials and contractors are stealing and reselling the surveillance state’s data at a profit. Remote Amazon villages are getting connected to the internet via Starlink and immediately getting addicted to porn.4
Anyone who read cyberpunk as a kid probably knew, deep down, that there would be people who looked like this (I recommend clicking through to the video):
There are plenty of other examples around.
In the 1980s novels, of course, it was Japan that was the neon-drenched “country of the future”. But for a combination of electric lights, urban canyons, ubiquitous smog, maze-like layouts, and other staples of cyberpunk aesthetics, it’s hard to beat 21st-century Chongqing:
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.
But while I’m grateful to be able to see all of those marvels come to life, the real world isn’t like a storybook.
The monsters of the Future
The “punk” in cyberpunk comes from the gritty, compromised feel of the future the writers envisioned. Mid-century authors had usually imagined an “onward and upward” path of ever-increasing state capacity — galactic federations and empires, a united Earth, and so on. But the cyberpunks usually depicted worlds where governments were either hapless and weak — sharing power with corporations, cults, wealthy individuals, and AIs — or domineering and totalitarian. And where mid-century authors often depicted thriving middle classes who could afford to access futuristic wonders, cyberpunk worlds are typically rife with inequality, where the best tech is only available to a select few.
Cyberpunk worlds are not necessarily fun ones to live in, even if you’re an ace hacker with a trenchcoat and mirrorshades.
The cyberpunks authors’ social extrapolations were a bit more hit-or-miss than their technological visions. Modern corporations aren’t exactly weak, but Google, Huawei, Apple, and BYD don’t resemble the lawless, heavily armed quasi-state actors of 80s/90s fiction. Instead they’re all under the thumb of national governments.
And inequality, while certainly a problem, isn’t as pervasive as the cyberpunks envisioned. Only the rich can afford embryo selection, but the middle class has all the latest gadgets, and poor people in America have smartphones and can use ChatGPT for free. The world, too, has become much more economically equal and much more prosperous; some developing countries are still mired in squalor, but most are not.
But there are still plenty of ways in which new technology has disrupted the institutions that got us through the 20th century. For example, ubiquitous networked technologies have become a de facto surveillance state — Apple or Google or some other company always has your current location, and the government can probably have it if it wants. Cyberpunk heroes might be able to hide out in the anonymous darkness of cities, but in the actual future, true privacy is pretty much dead. In the hands of unscrupulous governments like China’s, digital surveillance has become an unprecedented tool of fine-grained social control.
Meanwhile, social media has proven to be an incredibly disruptive force in modern liberal societies. In the 20th century, the free flow of information allowed pluralism, inclusion, and new ideas to flourish, giving liberal democracies an advantage. But in the 21st century, social media often creates destructive status wars, as society’s worst agitators seize the microphone and whip up hatreds among the polity. And the ultra-low cost of information also means that disinformation is basically free, meaning that politics becomes a tournament to see who can put out a more massive flood of lies, stupid memes, and deepfakes.
Worryingly, only authoritarian governments like China seem to have been able to keep a lid on the roiling social conflicts and meme wars that social media has given rise to. That raises the disturbing possibility that the information technologies of the cyberpunk age tip the scales of power toward authoritarianism. The dark visions of future politics common to so many cyberpunk novels — weak, compromised, and ineffectual government in democracies, strong effective government in autocracies — might end up coming to pass after all.
There are plenty of other ways in which new technologies might lead to dystopian outcomes. Beyond the obvious ones — rogue AGI and bioterrorism — there’s the possibility that modern technology might make replacement-level fertility impossible, leading to a grim, gray, shrinking world where working people have to toil ever longer and harder to support vast armies of the aged. Smartphones equipped with social media might also be leading to an epidemic of depression, loneliness, and reduced cognitive skills.
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.
When I say “fantasy physics”, I don’t mean “things we’ll never figure out how to do”. Someday we may figure out warp drive or gravity control.
Rudy Rucker probably could.
AI — specifically, OpenAI’s o3 model — also helped me write this post. It summarized the cyberpunk literature, in case there were any key works I hadn’t read. It helped me do a search for cyberpunk-esque stories in the news. And it helped me map various new technologies to the authors who first predicted them.
Where are my nanomachines, Hideo
When people look back to the 2010s in a few decades, they will be horrified by the naivete of the West. Just because authoritarian regimes do something, doesn't mean that that thing should not be done at all. Leaving the cyberspace completely unregulated in the hands of the private sector is a mistake, and people in the future would gasp in disgust when they see videos of our kids being exposed to social media unobstructed, the same way we are disturbed by juvenile access to tobacco and alcohol decades ago.