The science fiction writer William Gibson has spent more time than most thinking about the future. In his earliest novels, published in the 1980s, he imagined that cyber space, a term he popularised, would develop as a separate realm, quite distinct from the real world.
But when I interviewed him in a pre-crisis London this year about his latest novel Agency (set presciently enough in a post-apocalyptic world), he acknowledged that the future that had arrived was very different from his vision of three decades ago.
Cyber space had not evolved in parallel with the real world, it was merging with it, he said. The supercomputers called smartphones that we carry around in our pockets are erasing the boundaries between the virtual and the physical. We may be the last generation to recognise any distinction between online and offline. “Our world is everting,” he said, as cyber space is opening out.