Michael Abrash once pointed out that the really brilliant science fiction authors don’t just imagine the gadget - they foresee how the gadget will change society. I’ve found this ability to envision society-sweeping changes appears in visionary writers even when they might get the exact technology wrong.
For example on The Accomplice, one of Vernor Vinge’s short stories written in 1967 which I’ll spoil on this paragraph, a company owner is outraged to find that one of this trusted men has been stealing valuable processing cycles from their mainframe - a seriously outdated concern nowadays. Two particular details mark that story as the work of a technology seer. First, the reason this employee is stealing processing cycles is in order to make a computer-generated movie. Seventeen years before The Last Starfighter, Vinge had already seen that some special effects were just too expensive to make anywhere else; when whole worlds need to be generated, nothing else will suffice. Second, the movie they’re generating is an adaptation of a certain J.R.R. Tolkien book.
Even aware of the man’s genius, Vinge still manages to catch me unprepared. I’d never read True Names, but I knew it was written years before Neuromancer and was effectively the source of the cyberpunk genre, so when I recently got the book I didn’t expect any surprises to be lurking within. And it turns out, what hit me like a sledgehammer was not on the novella itself but a bit that Vinge wrote near the end of his introduction, when speaking about wether computer networks will hinder or help human freedom.
On the other hand, there are the “Four Horsemen” that Tim, Alan and Lenny remark upon. All four horsemen are good excuses for the incremental tightening of regulation and enforcement (some being more effective with one constituency than another), but I think the “Terrorist Horseman” is the one that could shift our whole society towards strict controls. Just a few really ghastly terrorist incidents would be enough to cause a sea change in public opinion. It’s not hard to imagine the entire country run the way airports were run in the late twentieth century.
He wrote that in August 1999.