Computer not tired, has great memory, is very fast. Of course fiction doesn t always come this close to getting it right. Or perhaps in some cases we aren t far enough along to tell. It remains to be seen, for example, whether certain golden-age science fiction novelists of the 1920s and 1930s did a poor job of predicting computer technology and its impact on our world. Of course we re not going to be basing a design these days on vacuum tubes, but it might be too early to judge whether we ll one day be flitting about in personal helicopters.
Prediction is difficult, goes the joke, especially when it comes to the future.
Perhaps in this sense science fiction isn t all that different from plain old product proposals and spec sheets that chart the effects of a new technology on our lives. Often, outdoing earlier fictions simply entailed imagining a device smaller or more portable or with greater functionality exactly the kind of enhancements at the heart of competition in the computing marketplace today. Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman wrote in 1959 that physics did not prevent devices, motors, and computers from being built, atom by atom, at the molecular level. 4 Feynman s basic idea was to build a microfactory that we would use to build an even smaller factory, which in turn would make one even smaller until we were able to access and manipulate the individual atom. While we haven t yet realized Feynman s goal of an atomic-level machine, we ve been steadily moving in that direction for at least 50 years.