Good question. There's lots of things I might talk about, and it's hard to pick a particular one. Like most geeks, I would be happy if space travel existed as much as science fiction hoped. But even we do start building towards missions to mars and asteroid mining, it probably won't be a revolutionary change. I hate the energy wasted (by me and society as a whole) on travelling to places we need to be, I'd be interested to see how society would change if you could open a zero-hour almost-free transport link from the middle of one area to another, or even from each house.
Many fictional inventions have come a long way to existing. I'm really used to always having a map and encyclopaedia in my pocket, and widely-used asynchronous communication that lets me build friendships with people who are similar to me as well as people who live in geographical proximity to me. And being able to deal with many bills, forms, etc, with the press of some buttons, without having to go places. I don't think I was cut out for the 20th century :)
But one example that especially springs to mind is Bujold's uterine replicator, that can safely gestate a baby without a human womb, for what it symbolises about society. It's the sort of thing that sometimes rubs some hard science fiction fans the wrong way, because it's not physics or mechanical engineering, and the focus is on the societal implications, not how the technology could be built. But I think the same is often true of hard sci-fi, of building something which seems plausible, but not always from actual blue-prints, and seeing where you go with it.
On the one hand the uterine replicator is a symbol of how society could change, if gestating babies wasn't randomly assigned to half of the population. And all sorts of secondary potential changes: like Athos, the planet of only men[1]; or the possibility of centralising child-rearing completely, and people can be parents only if they'd like to be; or of reducing the need to unwanted pregnancies.
On the other hand, a lot of the inequality in society is cultural, not biological, in the assumptions that mothers should be primary child-rearers more than fathers, even apart from gestation and breast-feeding. So maybe it wouldn't make that much of a difference :(
Footnotes
[1] I thought Athos was interesting example of Bujold's worldbuilding, in that she postulated Athos as originally populated by monastics, but that after a couple of generations there was a mix of monastic celibate farmers, and essentially gay cosmopolitan culture, but because she didn't NEED to, she never specified if the proportions were 90%/10% or 10%/90% and the reader could assume either way.
This post brought to you in the past from the future by the power of cheating! :)
Many fictional inventions have come a long way to existing. I'm really used to always having a map and encyclopaedia in my pocket, and widely-used asynchronous communication that lets me build friendships with people who are similar to me as well as people who live in geographical proximity to me. And being able to deal with many bills, forms, etc, with the press of some buttons, without having to go places. I don't think I was cut out for the 20th century :)
But one example that especially springs to mind is Bujold's uterine replicator, that can safely gestate a baby without a human womb, for what it symbolises about society. It's the sort of thing that sometimes rubs some hard science fiction fans the wrong way, because it's not physics or mechanical engineering, and the focus is on the societal implications, not how the technology could be built. But I think the same is often true of hard sci-fi, of building something which seems plausible, but not always from actual blue-prints, and seeing where you go with it.
On the one hand the uterine replicator is a symbol of how society could change, if gestating babies wasn't randomly assigned to half of the population. And all sorts of secondary potential changes: like Athos, the planet of only men[1]; or the possibility of centralising child-rearing completely, and people can be parents only if they'd like to be; or of reducing the need to unwanted pregnancies.
On the other hand, a lot of the inequality in society is cultural, not biological, in the assumptions that mothers should be primary child-rearers more than fathers, even apart from gestation and breast-feeding. So maybe it wouldn't make that much of a difference :(
Footnotes
[1] I thought Athos was interesting example of Bujold's worldbuilding, in that she postulated Athos as originally populated by monastics, but that after a couple of generations there was a mix of monastic celibate farmers, and essentially gay cosmopolitan culture, but because she didn't NEED to, she never specified if the proportions were 90%/10% or 10%/90% and the reader could assume either way.
This post brought to you in the past from the future by the power of cheating! :)