If someone from the 1950s suddenly appeared, what would be the most difficult thing to explain about life today?

TehBamski@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 302 points –
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Plenty of SF writers lived in that era and they predicted the Internet.

For example: I can name the writer and his novel where he predicted AI writing engines.

Can you really though?

I mean, no jokes though, why don’t you just name him instead of saying you could? Lol

Found it and translated the relevant section:

So it is necessary to write something. It's seemingly very simple - to write something. You stand in front of the conceptor, press a few keys at random and after ten seconds a slate pops up with a ready-made scheme, let's say a novella, with developed plots, psychological character, the duration of the plot, an attractive point.... Then the slate is thrown into a dialogoscript, which, having filled in the empty framework of the scheme with a record of the "verbal meat", feeds it further, to the visionary and phonocombi.... Then it is only necessary to teach the actors personalities, roles and twist it all with a copiosynchronization camera. Novelvision is ready.

Do remember that it comes from OLD times. Certain words are archaic now, certain were invented to sound futuristic and have no good equivalent.

...and I'd really prefer for people to come out with their own findings of similar predictions. The more the merrier.

That’s a cool section, thanks. Which book/story is this from?

Witold Zegalski "Wyspa Petersena" (Petersen's Island). It wasn't translated to English, but it's easy to find and modern online translators are quite reliable.

The book is a compilation of short stories. 2 or 3 from them describe the vision of a future world that seems to be the direction we're heading to. The excerpt was taken from one of them.

Coolio, thanks! I love old sci-fi like this. Specially the crazy sciency words lol

For real "so and so wrote about this" instead of whatever ambiguous nonsense that was lol

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