As an example, there's an entire chapter dedicated to Michel and his professor friend going through a long list of nineteenth-century authors and passing judgment on them. You would expect this to be the thinly disguised opinions of Jules Verne, but no, it's the thinly disguised opinions of Verne's editor, which Verne included in the hopes that it would help the book get published. Obviously, this was not successful.

I have a theory about Verne that's strongly based on this book. He is sometimes called a technological visionary, but most of the inventions of his books were already known at his time (the first submarine was made in 1620, Around the World in Eighty Days is likely based on an itinerary in a magazine Verne read, etc.), and what was not known, Verne often made work using lots of artistic license (like the giant gun from the Earth to the Moon, which would kill the passengers with the acceleration; Verne did not invent rockets). No, Verne's genius was that he took the progress that was already visible and used it to create adventures, that he created a vision of the future where all this technology is used to explore deep underground caves and the sea floor and outer space and find fascinating things there. And Paris in the Twentieth Century is the negative version of this, a world where technological progress does not expand imagination, but instead limits it, as everything gets economically optimised to death. It's a good warning to keep in mind.

I read a comment elsewhere speculating that the article was written by AI. It could be, but it also shows that authors have to now go extra lengths to prove what they write is not from a machine.

I am afraid future of art is bleak. Poems hand written by poets will be competing with machines. Movies by Nolan and AI probably would not be easily distinguishable. Would we still pay for human made movies when AI can generate one for us, with the ending and style we want?

Of course there will be value to human generated content, but probably much less than how it is today. It will be probably niche like art work for millionaires to boast than for masses to consume.

In that sense, I would say Verne was right to be worried.

Interestingly, another David Brin novel was nominated for the Hugo in 1996 (_Brightness Reef_, one of his Uplift books).

I am not sure I belive the story about thr manuscript however. It surfaced just as the Internet was becoming a thing. Coincidence?

While his predictions about technology were way more accurate for the 1960s (his intended target), his predictions about society and culture are prescient for the 2020's with the advent of generative AI

> "With Montaigne and maybe Rabelais it was What Do I Know? In the nineteenth century it was What Does It Matter to Me? And nowadays we say: How Much Does It Earn?"

For me, this also summarizes the introduction of the Internet to the masses, all the way to the present day.