*Pretty good essay. Although, if you'd like to see some improbable futures, you should check out the predictive record of left-wing British political writers.
http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-future-probably/#more-13887
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"Reading early Gibson today is fascinating in the way that collecting vintage watches would be fascinating: one is struck by a sense of time stilled and held in the hand, of possible futures frozen and suspended as technology brings new ones into being. When Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive were being written, Japan, as Gibson explains here, was “the global imagination’s default setting for the future” (“Modern Boys and Mobile Girls”). That possible future may not be a place we can actually visit with our bodies, but it is still a part of the long, weird story of humanity imagining itself.
"In essays here on Tokyo, on Singapore, on London, Gibson opens the skin of cities like old watches and looks for the peculiar synergy of metal and emotion that makes their gears spin. With each little tick, he sees the future city under the present one, waiting to be brought into being. It’s not really ever about colored hair or robot outfits, but about people and the breathtaking things they have a tendency to do when presented with technology that changes the way they live and communicate.
"There is discomfort, too, with the fact of this book as a physical object, with covers and pages to turn. The whole idea, in a collection of essays about future-tech and its implications, is a jarring anachronism — from its shiny silver first-edition cover, like the packaging on a toy robot, to a title so stupendously bad it deserves to be framed on an agent’s wall long into the Gibsonian future.
"Everything about this book is existentially absurd...."
