I wonder what the greybeards that grew up on this science fiction, now in their 40s/50s?, think of the world we live in today.
As one of them (I'll be 49 in a couple of months), I expect there is a pretty diverse range of opinions among us.
Me? Relative to cyberpunk fiction specifically? I think the old adage "the future is here, its just unevenly distributed" rings very true. Clearly in certain sense we are living in "the cyberpunk future". But by the same token there are obviously regards in which we are not (so far as we know).
I continue to see Cyberpunk as stimulating and fascinating in terms of thinking about the potential of technological developments, while continuing to be a warning about the dangers of certain paths that we might go down (and in some cases, are arguably already headed down). While I'm not as anti-advertising in the general sense as many HN'ers, I will say I dislike the way so much of what we call "tech" has become all about finding ways to serve more ads to more people, more efficiently - as opposed to working on finding better ways to purify water, sequester carbon from the atmosphere, etc. And I believe that there are company executives out there who would actually authorize the deployment of Max Headroom style "blipverts" even if they were exactly as flawed as described in Max Headroom. Not all would, of course, but I expect they exist.
My relationship with cyberpunk is a bit weird though, because I also don't share the broadly anti-capitalist sentiments often associated with "punk" ideology. In fact, I'm very much an an-cap[1]. So while I enjoy this fiction, I don't always interpret the political bits the way some others might. And as much as I see mega-corporations as an affront to human values, human decency, freedom, etc., I see governments as equally so (or more so). Both are just ways to concentrate power and oppress people in my book. shrug
Anyway, speaking more generally, I think the world we livein today is amazing in many ways, and kinda sucks in quite a few ways. I see Khan Academy, Youtube, Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, inexpensive but crazy powerful computers, ubiquitous bandwidth, hand-held computers (smart phones) that are basically straight out of science fiction, etc. as adding so much to our world and enabling so many things. But at the same time, you can't ignore climate change, pollution, poverty, rising sea levels, the recent surge in something resembling what you might call "right wing populist fascism", etc. and not be a bit bothered.
We can put men on the moon, but we have people living in cardboard boxes. It's frustrating because I'm convinced we can do better. sigh Sorry for the long rant.
Thank you for your perspective. A lot of the problems (and technologies to address them) you talk about are actively being worked on by the way, so it's not all doom and gloom!
