• Author: I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
• Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.

(source)

Robot

• "Robot" was coined in 1920 in Rossum's Universal Robots, from Czech "robota" meaning forced labor. In the novel, robots ran a factory and were badly mistreated.
• In 1944, General Pile in charge of AA command observed of his superhuman autonomous targeting guns "Now we saw the beginning of the first battle of the robots."

Soylent Green

• Soylent Green, from the eponymous movie filmed in 1973, featured a miracle food that was secretly made out of humans.
• Soylent turned into a meal replacement startup selling meal kits to busy tech bros.

Metaverse

• In 1992, Neal Stephenson writes Snow Crash set, as least in part, in a huge virtual reality world called the Metaverse… which is an unregulated corporate dystopia.
• In October 2021, Facebook rebrands itself to Meta and announces that its new mission is to build the metaverse.

(Some examples from https://interconnected.org/home/2022/02/18/torment_nexus)

Code is Law

• In 2000 Lawrence Lessig wrote his famous essay Code is Law, which argued that in the future, the software we use may erode the values we hold.
• In the late 2010s, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are governed by rules encoded as a computer program that is often transparent, controlled by the organization's members and not influenced by a central government.

Related to Required reading for VR enthusiasts