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[Kazuhiro]

There's something that's been bugging me about Shadowrun and all its technology. Shadowrun is supposed to be a cyberpunk world where what we think of as ultra-technology has become commonplace and has integrated into everyday life in such a way that it has made possible a dystopian, Orwellian world that blends tropes from Blade Runner and Tron, then dumps elves, orks, and trolls into the mix. Mostly, this is accomplished, what with the authoritarian UCAS, the unscrupulous security agencies and corp-sec, extraterritoriality, and the constant mention of soy food, plascrete, and plasteel.

Still, by and large, the technology is all wrong. It's what we could do with what we have now, if we refined it and then made it commonplace. I've always believed that the advances of the future will be things that we can't even imagine now.

SR4 had to turn everything wireless in order to catch up with the real world, for God's sake. I also find it amusing to think that the creators of SR1 didn't realize that there would be people in the Sixth World who could remember clearly the low-tech days of laptops and keyboards.

SR4's technology seems like things that we would see 15 years from now, not 70. Most of it is already in the works-- the Matrix more or less exists, all we need is full-VR. Full-VR is in the works, all we need is simsense, which we admittedly only have a dull idea of how to do. Cybernetic limbs are practically there already.

There are plenty of things in SR4 that are beyond our grasp, such as sentient AI, for example, or Wired Reflexes, or most Bioware, and Nanoware has just about always been the domain of speculative fiction, but these things are incremental advances from technology that we have now. If the Awakening is happening in 2011 (and I've got my fingers crossed, seeing as the US is showing signs of allowing extraterritoriality eventually) then I strongly believe that the future should have more Magitech. Think about what we've done with computers in the last 50 years. What could we do with magic in 70 years? Even if science doesn't quite apply to magic, there are magicians who can invoke magical effects at will, so they can then use the scientific method to determine the exact limitations and mechanisms involved. The sourcebook's excuse for "magitech" was a wand with glowing moss in the tip and a delivery system for weaponized FABII.

70 years from now we won't have technology that's an incrementally better version of what we have now, even if it's 4 or 5 increments better. Technology will probably have veered off in an entirely different direction, which we can't imagine yet.