Why Sci-Fi Writers Are Almost Always Wrong

William Gibson, the man who coined the word cyberspace, maintains that, thankfully, he and his fellow science fiction authors haven't got any reliable powers of prediction:

I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happen, what writers have said is going to happen, and what actually happened — it’s terrible. We’re almost always wrong. Our reputation for being right relies on some human capacity to marvel at the times when, yay, you got it right! Arthur Clarke predicted communications satellites and things like that. Those are marvelous — it’s great when someone gets it right, but almost always it’s wrong.

He also spoke to Wired about Twitter and other internet obsessions.