Introduction

Books, TV shows, and movies have been making futuristic predictions for decades, many of which were originally considered absurd. Star Trek featured several that proved to be not so outlandish: the indispensable handheld communicators have become today’s smartphones, the personal access display device is now our tablet, and a universal translator exists, of which there are several apps to choose. Edward Bellamy’s enigmatically titled 1887 book Looking Backward predicted debit and credit cards, and 2001: A Space Odyssey imagined forms of social media, though nothing on the scale that we currently have. Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock gripped readers in the 1970s as it predicted the exponential change destined to shake our society, and ...

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