'Earth' may be the densest source of Brin's predictions about what the future may hold for humanity, but it's hardly the only one! After all, it's nearly twenty years since the novel was released!
Lots to add in here. (So what else is new?)
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- The Partition of the Soviet Union, didn't quite make it into the novel EARTH in a highly explicit form. Still, it is among the few novels from 1989 that IMPLIED a coming breakup.
* In SUNDIVER (1980) Brin forecast the use of eye-gaze tracking as a method for psychological diagnosis, personality profiling or even lie-detection, since the eye subconciously scans and reacts to a scene for many milliseconds before the person becomes consciously aware of what he or she is looking at -- a period when feigning is inherently impossible.
Almost thirty years later, the cover story of the September 2007 Scientific American says that saccades (tiny eye movements) not only allow us to see, but quantify on what we are focused when looking at a scene. Is Citizen-testing far behind? According to Brin: "This tool is either an empowerment for Big Brother, or for the masses. If we all get it, then there will be social problems to solve, but never will tyrants stand a chance, ever again."
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