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95 years ago, a man was born whose name was forever inscribed in the pantheon of the best science fiction writers of all times and peoples. But Stanislav Lem is not only an excellent writer, but also a philosopher and futurologist, who in the middle of the 20th century gave surprisingly accurate predictions about our time.

Many of Lem’s predictions have come true, but much is still to come, perhaps, to occur, so today we will recall the various ideas and technologies mentioned in the writer's books.
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For Lem, science fiction was a form of thought experiment documented on paper. Perhaps his ideas will be useful to you for creating a new revolutionary product.

Full immersion in virtual reality

Long before “The Matrix”, Lem proposed the term “fantomatics” (in the book “The amount of technology”) to refer to technology intended to replace sensations, given by reality, with arbitrary ones. Thus, for the individual, a new reality is created, being in which they cannot distinguish it from reality with the help of their senses. The story “The Strange Boxes of Professor Corcoran” describes the possibility of simulating the whole world.

Mobile communications and smart clothes

In the novel "The Magellanic Cloud" a boy with his parents flew to the zoo to look at a real horse, but did not have time until the end of the tour. Then he ran away and turned off his communication device: “The boy connected his radio wave to the television screens of his parents so that they could always know where he is, the boy took off his hand and hid it under the chair.”
Also in this work mentions clothes that change color and pattern depending on the air temperature.

Touch Screens and Credit Cards

“Whether this Infor was some kind of genius, or I have already learned to express myself a little better, in any case, I acquired a plastic book with four folding pages - urban communications schemes. If it was necessary to get somewhere, it was enough to touch the names of the street, the level, the area - and on the map immediately flashed a plan of all the necessary routes.
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The bookstore was more like an electronics lab. Books are crystals with information captured in them.
They read the crystals with an opton. Opton looked like a real book with only one single page between the covers. From each touch, the next page of text appeared on it. ”
In the same novel, “Clusters” are mentioned - small adaptations replacing the circulation and circulation of money. When paying, a person submits this card to the cashier, who introduces it to the cash register connected to the bank. The computer sends the bank computer how many monetary units need to be debited from the account; the same happens along the payer's route (or his computer) - the payer bank (or his “call center”).

Cloning

In the Star Diaries of Iyon Tikhiy, the protagonist had many copies of various ages. In the Sum of Technologies, cloning is discussed in the subsection Plagiarism and Creation.

Minicopter

In the story “The Invincible”, the main character encounters an organized form of inanimate matter — swarms of metallic insects that kill everything in their path.

“Because, since our opponents are the creatures of inanimate evolution, which certainly have no psyche, we cannot discuss the problem of revenge, retribution for the Condor, for the fate of our comrades. It is like trying to strike the ocean in which a ship with people drowned. ”

Nano-weapon ("smart dust")

“The old types of weapons did not coexist for long with the new ones: heavy, cumbersome combat weapons irrevocably fell under the onslaught of micro-weapons. After all, it was almost invisible. As microbes imperceptibly penetrate the animal’s body to kill it from the inside, so lifeless, artificial microbes, according to the tropism contained in them, penetrated into the muzzle of guns, charging chambers, engines of tanks and airplanes, gnawed through armor or, reaching the powder charges, blew them . And what could the bravest and most experienced soldier, hung with grenades, do with a microscopic and dead enemy? No more than a doctor who chose to fight the cholera microbes with a hammer. Among the clouds of micro-weapons, homing at given targets, biotropical weapons, that is, destroying all life, a man in uniform was helpless, like a Roman legionary with a shield and a sword under a hail of bullets. ”

Bloody relaxation

"Much more interesting than the Bermuda Triangle, I consider the triangle between the car, pornography and the entertainment industry (show business), as in this area the market niche is gaping, which nobody has noticed so far, let alone tried to fill it. <...> After you got behind the wheel, you should familiarize yourself with several unknown devices: for extending forceps from fools, an old age remover, a baton device along with a device for determining sex, there is a pedal of a stinky sprayer with a centrifugal excrement pump next to it, and close to the gear lever glows red laser gun grip for the most extreme cases. "

Does Carmageddon remind you? And this is Tobin, written in 1978. This essay was later published in Black and White.


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Some things are just useless to quote - you need to read the whole thing. The Sum of Technologies, written in 1963, contains many details about the Internet, nanotechnology, and cloning. However, in almost every work of Lem, you can find interesting thoughts and non-obsolete ideas. At a certain moment, he practically ceased reading fiction, in order to concentrate fully on the works on cybernetics, astronautics, genetics and other scientific fields, trying to find an answer to the questions of what will happen at the first contact with the alien mind, whether dead people need to be resurrected, whether society will appear “With a maximum of happiness for a maximum of people,” will we find “points of contact” with artificial intelligence.

The predictions that came true during Lem's lifetime (for example, the appearance of the Internet) finally convinced him to abandon science fiction and completely switch to futurology. In conclusion, we quote Lem, who today also has an anniversary. These words appeared 50 years ago, but still have not lost their relevance:

“Science fiction is not at all prophetic literature, as others mistakenly think. Predictions of scientific and technical achievements are inevitably doomed to failure. Even Jules Verne seems to us very archaic now. What then to talk about today, when it is impossible to anticipate all the possible qualitatively new jumps that are made in the life of mankind thanks to the success of science! Science fiction, rather, looks like a gigantic and powerful magnifying glass in which we look at development trends — social, moral, philosophical — that we see in our present day. In essence, speaking of the future, of life on distant planets, I am talking about contemporary problems and my contemporaries, only dressed in galactic clothes. Nowadays, in order to practice science fiction, one fantasy is not enough, you still need to know a lot! ”