EVER WONDER...IF TODAYS TECHNOLOGY IS YESTERDAY'S SCIENCE FICTION

With the rapid on slot of new technology it often seems to come out of no where- cell phones and the Internet as just some brain magic that an engineer cranked out in his spare time. This is wrong on many levels- the first being that things don't develop that quickly, and in fact the Internet was a brain baby in someones mind many years before it became reality. Second- technology evolves from these embryonic brain babies into week prototypes, and it takes quite a while for it to mature into a standard adult technological interface.
Sometimes these embryonic brain babies don't come out of the minds of scientists and engineers, but instead the creative brains of science fiction writers.
Neal Stephenson in his book Diamond Age (a novel based around an electronic book) influenced the creation of the Amazons Kindle e-book. He also wrote another book called Snowcrash, which inspired the 3D online worlds like WoW and Secondlife.
A film called Metropolis made in 1927, which is about a deadly machine monster, pre-dates the first Artificial Intelligence Center by thirty-nine years.
Invisibility has been a topic of discussion for a very long time, even going back as far as Greek mythology and Plato's The Republic. Being one of Science- Fictions favorite non- existing inventions it has also been used in an array of popular books and series like Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings,The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Artemis Fowl. Stealth technology began to develop in the 1930's for ships, planes, and missiles. More recently in 2006, a team in Britain developed the first stages of an invisibility cloak.
Last but not least (actually, we'll call them the best :D) are all of the inventions predicted by Star Trek. The first being flip phones, which were inspired by Starfleet communicators. Next the interactive computer, the one that you can talk to and it will answer back. Last being the iPhone, which I would relate to the tricorder devise; I feel like it could do just about anything; now, we don't need our phones to do everything, but if it doesn't do it- than there is probably an app for it!

Of course, Science-Fiction doesn't try and predict the future, but with all of the crazy ideas floating around in the fiction-verse, some of them have to make it in the tech world. And thank goodness too- I would be so lost without my GPS App!