We Are Living in the Future… Apparently

I’ve come to a slightly unsettling realisation.

We are living in the future.

Not the “hoverboards on every street and dinner in pill form” future that was promised, but still. The future nonetheless. I can stand in my kitchen, holding a small glowing rectangle, and ask it questions about literally anything. And it answers me. Not always correctly, mind you, but confidently, which is arguably more impressive.

It got me thinking. Is this actually the future we imagined, or just the one we ended up with?

For years, science fiction fed us a very particular vision of what was to come. Starships. Holograms. Doors that open with a satisfying whoosh. Most importantly, computers that you could simply talk to.

“Computer, locate Captain Jenkins.”

“Computer, play something dramatic while I stare out of a window.”

That sort of thing.

And now, here we are, casually saying things like, “Hey Siri, what’s the weather doing?” or “Alexa, why do I feel tired all the time?” We don’t even question it. We just accept that we can chat to a machine as if it’s a slightly underqualified but enthusiastic assistant.

So the question is this. Did we invent this technology because we needed it, or because someone once wrote it into a story and we collectively thought, “That looks quite handy”?

It’s hard not to suspect the latter.

Take voice assistants. At some point, a writer decided that in the future, typing would feel a bit pedestrian. Why press buttons when you can speak? It’s quicker, more natural, and it makes you feel like you’re in charge of a spaceship, even if you are actually just trying to set a timer for your pasta.

And then, engineers came along and thought, “Well, we should probably make that real.”

It’s as if science fiction handed humanity a checklist. Communicators that fit in your pocket. Video calls. Artificial intelligence that can hold a conversation. We’ve been ticking them off one by one, like overachieving students who really want to impress the teacher.

Of course, not everything made the cut. I have yet to see a convincing flying car that doesn’t look like it might fall apart if you sneeze near it. And while holograms do exist, they are rarely used for dramatic monologues, which feels like a missed opportunity.

But the core idea remains. We seem to be building the future that was imagined for us.

Which raises a slightly odd possibility.

If those early writers had imagined something different, would we have followed that instead?

What if the dominant vision of the future had been less about talking to machines and more about, I don’t know, extremely advanced carrier pigeons? Would we now be standing in our gardens, shouting messages at birds with tiny satchels, marvelling at how far we’ve come?

It sounds ridiculous. But then again, so does casually asking a plastic cylinder to turn your lights off.

There is something quite powerful about imagination in all of this. Science fiction does not just predict the future. It nudges it. It gives people a direction to aim for. Engineers, designers, inventors. They all grew up on stories where incredible things were normal. So they set about making them normal.

In that sense, sci fi writers might be some of the most influential architects of the modern world. Not because they knew what would happen, but because they suggested what could.

And we, as a species, seem to have taken that as a challenge.

“Go on then,” we said. “Let’s see if we can actually do it.”

So here we are. Living in the future. Talking to machines. Carrying supercomputers in our pockets. Occasionally asking them deeply philosophical questions, and more often asking them how long to boil an egg.

It may not be the future we were promised in every detail. There is a distinct lack of dramatic whooshing doors in my daily life. But it is undeniably shaped by the stories we told ourselves.

Which makes me wonder what happens next.

Because somewhere, right now, someone is writing a story about the future.

And if history has taught us anything, it’s that we might just try to build it.