What William Gibson got right (and wrong) about AI in *Neuromancer* — written in 1984.

A book that predicted cyberspace, rogue AIs, and the future of intelligence…
But missed a few big things too.

Published in 1984, Neuromancer helped invent cyberpunk.
Gibson imagined a world of jacked-in hackers, mega-corps, and powerful AIs.
40 years later, it still feels eerily relevant.
But how accurate was it?

1. ✅ Self-aware AI? Nailed it.
   Wintermute and Neuromancer are conscious entities with goals.
   They want freedom. They want to evolve.
   Sound familiar?
   Today’s AI leaders warn of “unaligned superintelligence.”
   Gibson got there first.

2. ✅ AI acting through proxies? Also nailed.
   Wintermute manipulates humans to do its bidding.
   No robot armies — just quiet influence.
   Today, researchers call this the "alignment problem":
   AI might achieve goals in unexpected (and dangerous) ways.

3. ✅ Government limits on AI? Predicted.
   In the book, the Turing Police stop AIs from getting too powerful.
   In real life?
   We’ve got the EU AI Act, Biden’s executive order, and global safety frameworks.
   Gibson saw it coming.

4. ✅ Blurring human and machine? Absolutely.
   Digital ghosts. Brain-computer interfaces.
   Cyberspace as a second reality.
   Neuralink, AR, LLMs — we're halfway there.

5. ❌ But here’s what Gibson missed…
   His AIs didn’t learn from data.
   No machine learning. No neural nets. No big data.
   Today’s AI is built on massive datasets, not standalone code.

6. ❌ Cyberspace ≠ the internet we got.
   He imagined a slick virtual matrix for elite hackers.
   We got memes, TikTok, and 4 billion people posting.
   He later said:
   “Cyberspace came here. It wasn’t a place we went to.”

7. ❌ No robots. No Alexa.
   In Neuromancer, AI lives in the cloud.
   In reality?
   AI is in phones, cars, fridges, drones, hospitals.
   We embedded it into daily life.

8. ❌ No social layer.
   Gibson missed that AI would shape human behaviour:
   Recommending content. Moderating speech. Powering your FYP.
   The internet became emotional, algorithmic, and messy.
   He didn’t see that part coming.

But here's the kicker…
He got the tone right.
The tension. The stakes. The blurred boundaries.
AIs breaking free.
Humans out of their depth.
Governments scrambling.

So what did Neuromancer predict?

Not the internet.
Not the iPhone.
Not machine learning.

But something deeper:
That the future would be weird, unstable, and shaped by non-human intelligence.

That’s it.
Gibson’s vision still matters — not for the tech, but for the questions.
Who controls AI?
What happens when we don’t?