David Brin works out of his home office in San Diego County, but he spends much of his day in invisible worlds—ones hidden from us because we can’t perceive them or because they don’t even exist yet. For the past three decades, the Hugo Award–winning author has been mapping out his vision of the future in dozens of works, both nonfiction and sci-fi. His 1998 book, The Transparent Society, explores how technological innovations force us to choose between privacy and security, foreshadowing the era of YouTube and ubiquitous surveillance cameras. His 1990 novel, Earth, anticipates so many of today’s trends—from the World Wide Web to global warming—that there is a Web site devoted entirely to its prognostications.
How did this 56-year-old father of three, who lives mostly outside of academia, get so adept at parsing the future? By keeping his journeys of imagination grounded in the real world. After getting a master’s in electrical engineering at the University of California at San Diego, Brin completed a Ph.D. in space physics and worked as a postdoc at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Today, in addition to churning out novels that chart his fictional Uplift universe, he continues to work closely with the people developing technologies that will transform our lives.
Why do you have such a good track record as a prognosticator?
When prediction serves as polemic, it nearly always fails. Our prefrontal lobes can probe the future only when they aren’t leashed by dogma. The worst enemy of agile anticipation is our human propensity for comfy self-delusion.
