The Future of Cyberpunk Is Here: How Accurate Are They?

For years, the sci-fi genre known as cyberpunk envisioned a future of chrome-clad cowboys, cyber cowboys, and criminals fighting against corporations that spread across the globe. Forty years later, much of that future has arrived—just not in the way its creators hoped.

Brain-computers interact like NeuralinkAI-powered smart glassesand increased robotics prosthetics have begun to bring the scientifically engineered future of chrome into the real world. At the same time, several technology companies, including OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google, are now shaping the way billions of people communicate, work, and interact increasingly with artificial intelligence.

As its name suggests, cyberpunk combines advanced technology with the anti-establishment spirit of the punk movement. The result is a vision of “high tech, low life,” popularized by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, where exciting innovation coexists with extreme poverty, crime, corruption, and corporate power. From William Gibson’s Neuromancer to Neal Stephenson’s Snow damage, Ready Player Oneand Cyberpunk 2077the nation saw a world of subtle, deep wisdom the real thingto advance cybernetic, and companies as popular They are hunting and Militechso strong that they even fight against governments.

For many people building the Internet culture of the late 1980s and 1990s, these stories didn’t sound like dystopian warnings about what technology could be.

Ken Goffman-better known as RU Sirius, co-founder The world of 2000 and co-author of Cyberpunk Handbook– remembers cyberpunk as an era defined by experimentation and optimism.

“All those black things were very dark The world but it all feels like a play,” Goffman said Decrypt. “If a dystopia were to come, it was what was going on in our heads at the time that we could live with and laugh at.”

The future, he said, turned out to be very limited for film.

“Even now some people think the apocalypse is going to be fun like ‘Mad Max,’ but what it is, it’s boring and restrictive.”

Like many early Internet pioneers, Goffman believed that computers and social networking technologies would shift power away from governments and corporations.

“We feel like they were a little bit better,” Goffman said. “They give us this power, and we mess it up – maybe even overthrow them, overthrow the government, overthrow everything.”

Instead, many of the companies that built those technologies became some of the most powerful corporations in the world.

“That was one of the mistakes, I think, maybe in our thinking – that it wouldn’t be too difficult.”

Goffman also saw the Internet as losing one of its properties: anonymity.

“Facebook made me change my name from RU Sirius to Ken Goffman,” he said. “This seemed like the beginning of the end of something.”

Looking back, he wonders if cyberculture helped create an Internet that few of its pioneers would recognize.

“Did we blow the truth together?” Goffman was surprised. “Did we shoot real and true?”

For Shira Chess, a professor of entertainment and media studies at the University of Georgia and author of The Unseen Internet, cyberpunk’s lasting value lies less in its aesthetic than in its understanding of power.

“We were trying to look at the shiny parts without looking at what the shiny parts mean,” Chess said. Decrypt. “The form that cyberpunk refers to is always within a dystopia.”

He says that the biggest prediction of cyberpunk was not cybernetic legs or glass shades.

“The thing that no one wants to fully address is the time when corporations took over the digital space,” he said. “We finished – we cooked.”

While the Internet is, for the most part, freely available and accessible, much of the Internet is post-subscription, proprietary AIs, and closed ecosystems controlled by a few companies.

Chess sees the same pattern emerging around artificial intelligence. Instead of worrying about intelligent machines, they are more concerned with human behavior they talk about them. In November 2022, Elon Musk he warned for people to be “calling on the devil.” Speaking at MIT in 2014, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO compared AI researchers to a magician trying to summon a spirit.

“I don’t believe there’s a demon in a box with AI,” Chess said. “What I believe is that the more things we do as they are, the more difficult it is to prove to future generations that they don’t exist.”

However he also sees signs of a new cyberpunk movement emerging, showing the growing popularity of cyberdecks-Custom-built computers assembled from recycled materials, open source software, and off-the-shelf materials – in an attempt to regain control over human technology.

“I believe that the cyberpunk genre will find a new life, and maybe going to cyberdecks is the first step of that,” he said, describing them as a way to try “to imagine the technology that has not been controlled as it has become.”

That philosophy also extends to programming. As AI coding assistants become more commonplace, Chess worries that developers are at risk of being pushed out of the systems they rely on.

“The more you do that, the more you don’t understand systems,” he said. “To be able to fight, they have to learn how to create and create things that are not seen in organizations.”

He also sees signs that the conflict at the heart of cyberpunk is resurfacing in the real world. Organizations such as Stop the AI ​​Race, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and community groups are on the rise opponents the new AI data centers concerns about water use, electricity demand, and environmental degradation. At the same time, open source producers and privacy advocates he criticized the closed nature of AI. And recently, AI assistants are popular OpenClaw and Helper of Hermes they’ve given everyone their own hard-working, self-promoting AIs.

“The main argument with cyberpunk is that you have to fight against it,” Chess said. “For all the anti-hero vigilantes, there has to be a rebuttal, and it has to be a corporate initiative.”

The struggle to use law against government and corporate oppression can also be felt in the cryptocurrency and blockchain space, with groups including Project Spartacus using Bitcoin network to protect it WikiLeaks Afghan War Logs. In 2023, it was found that a copy of the Bitcoin Whitepaper was hidden in Apple’s operating system, macOS.

Like cyberpunk, however, anger at the AI ​​industry can turn violent. In April, the suspect allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at the home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in San Francisco before threatening OpenAI’s headquarters.

When asked what’s next, Chess pointed to the younger generations.

“I think there’s something coming,” he said. “Gen Z and Gen Alpha have a negative view of the technology they were raised with.”

Forty years later Neuromancercyberpunk doesn’t seem like a failed prediction but a surprisingly accurate one. The biggest surprise is that the constant prediction of cyberpunk was not chrome, but the fight against those who control it.