After a long time, I recently reread the science fiction short story A Logic Named Joe, and it reminded me of Bystroushaak’s blog post The Future. I don’t want to argue with him here, but I’m writing this because this story is one of those rare exceptions where an author managed to extrapolate the development of computing technology surprisingly well.
The short story A Logic Named Joe was written by Murray Leinster and it was first published in 1946 (yes, that’s not a typo). In Czech it appeared in 1988 as Logik Joe in the collection “Robots and Androids” translated by Jindřich Smékal.
Just to put things into perspective: in the year 1946, ENIAC was put into operation, and few people today could recall off the top of their heads any other example of a computer from that era, unless they’re enthusiasts of computing history (though this is partly because other computers were classified for some time due to their military applications, see for example the earlier Colossus).
And yet Murray Leinster was able to more or less imagine something like personal computers (which are ubiquitous in the world of his story, used both for purely business purposes as well as in households), a global computer network, client-server architecture and data centers, online services, a search engine… including some of the problems that arise from all of this. I don’t want to be too specific here, it’s a funny and short story (don’t expect some complex plot or deep reflection), so I want to avoid spoilers (everything I’ve written so far is apparent from the very beginning of the story).
Moreover if you read it with today’s perspective, you can’t help but notice certain analogies with what’s common today, without the author trying to suggest anything like that - naturally. Similarly, Google didn’t exist when I first read this story in Czech translation back in elementary school, without having direct experience using the internet. So what seems most interesting to me about it today is what either didn’t occur to me at all back then or what I didn’t consider that remarkable. However, I must add that I wasn’t checking how old the story was at the time.
Furthermore, from today’s viewpoint, it may be interesting how the author imagined censorship or openness on the network, but as I wrote above, this probably wasn’t his main goal.
If you find this interesting, you can read the original English version right away.