What futuristic work of fiction is humanity closest to becoming?

Idiocracy/Dont look up/1984/Judge Dredd

My bets on Robocop style corporate dictatorship until terminator style annihilation occurs.
Star Trek was never on the cards.
- Actually, star trek might be. In their lore, things got a lot worse before they got better.

You better start believing in cyberpunk dystopia, Miss Turner. You're in one!

Not sure which one. But we already pretty much check all the boxes of cyberpunk.

- Damnit, I managed to trip into a Shadowrun campaign and I didn't even roll a Dwarf.

100% its cyberpunk. corpo takeover with having to use technology to get by even when it is bad for you.

Yeah, but where the hell are my leg implants that allow me to double jump and air dash already?
- air dash is a skill. your just being lazy.
We don't even get cool neon signs, everything is sad beige now... :(
- Makes me think of
- honestly the neon all over like tokyo is one of the more unrelistic aspects to me. same with the private link. all the ads will be straight to the optic nerve and it will be so dreary when looking at it plainly.

Idiocracy.

Birth rates are down everywhere and the majority of the people left making lots of babies are not the ones you wish would be having them. Being virtuous and on the "right side of history" means nothing if those values die with you and are not passed to the next generation.

This is not the first time i've seen sentiments similar to this around here. Just know this is an extremely elitist and racist viewpoint, and is one of the core arguments in favor of eugenics.
- I don't see what's elitist or racist about it. It's just an observation of how things are. I'm not advocating for anything here.
- A eugenist pov would defend selecting human individuals based on their genetic makeup, something people have no control over and is effectively a prejudice. Idiocracy shows the degeneracy of society based on societal factors such as disinformation, wealth, etc. and is an accurate prediction of western society's current state (specifically US, but is also valid in part for US-aligned nationstates such as France). My guess as a layman is there is some inverse statistical correlation between political knowledge and babymaking, but as we know, correlation isn't causation, and if there is anyone to blame, it's the bourgeoisie. Cut some heads in time for spring, they'll regrow better
Being virtuous and on the "right side of history" means nothing if those values die with you and are not passed to the next generation.
Why not?
- People more or less adopt their values from their parents and the people they grow up with. The christian right and redneck hillbillys are making kids and thus their beliefs will carry over to the next generation but this is much less the case with the liberal left where not having children is much more common. Basically, the more educated you are the less likely you're to have kids. This is true all over the world.
the majority of the people left making lots of babies are not the ones you wish would be having them
Found the eugenicist

WALL-E. We just don't have a way to escape yet, but the rest is happening regardless.

That's a very optimistic view of our future.
I’m sure Bezass and Muskpoo got us covered, just most of us can’t afford to leave with them.

V for Vendetta

I like your optimism
- L for Luigi?

A combination of Snow Crash and Idiocracy

Might as well throw some Terminator and 'The Machine Stops' in there.

Her.

Given that we've already had a few suicides caused by (or at least exacerbated by) LLM chatbots, I think we're already there.

100% no doubt The parable of the sower and subsequent book. I read that book - started reading it - in June this year and read it over about a month. It was very creepy to be reading a sci fy book set in the future that is now my present and while it is not as bad right now as Octavia Butler makes it out to be, we are definitely heading there if drastic action is not taken immediately.

Edit: the books in order: (Only two, sadly she died while writing the third but still both worth reading, there isn't a clif hanger at the end) https://www.octaviabutler.com/parableseries

Absolutely this! Octavia Butler literally wrote a fascist American president with the slogan "Make America Great Again" in 1993.

Lots of good suggestions so far, Brave New World and Don't Look Up would be right up there for me. But my #1 is this...

The Machine Stops (PDF) Written in 1909 so out of copyright, this book is so ahead of its time it makes remarkable reading today. The amount of things predicted that describe the modern day is incredible. It's also not that long, so well worth a read.

I do believe that a lot of aspects of The Ministry for the Future by K.S. Robinson have chances of becoming true.

The deadly heatwave in south Asia, governments going rogue and playing with geo engineering on their own, climate refugee camps and the general sense of too little too late.

But the book is fairly optimistic, so hopefully, people of the world getting together and accepting a new paradigm will come to be true.

1984

Parable of the Sower

It was written as near future fiction anyway. In fact the dates mentioned in the book start out in our past. Just the catalyst events haven’t quite happened yet. Add a few years to the dates and I could see us heading towards that kind of societal break down.

This book is haunting. It made me seriously consider buying a gun. If I could convince my wife to read it, we'd probably have an armory by now.

Horizon Zero Dawn: Total extinction by the 2060s because some mad, narcissistic Elon Musk guy overestimates himself and fucks it up for the whole world? Doesn't sound too far-fetched to me right now.

I could see the Golgafrinchan telephone sanitizer situation coming to pass.

Just time for another bath!

The Water Knife by Paolo Baccigalupi is pretty on the nose for the near future of the southern US

It thought that Vegas was an abomination, a testament to the vanity of mankind but that book made me understand that Phoenix has twice as many people, is bigger though sure, is a little wetter on average and should hold that title.
How is this one of the cheapest cities to live in in the US? Why are we moving the micro chip industry there?

Brave New World

In some ways we’re already living it

Forced promiscuity?

Radicalized was pretty damn close to the mark. Sure in this case Luigi was radicalized from back pain and not cancer.

I'm going to go obscure here and say that the world of 2077 from the television show Continuum

It ran for a few seasons; I enjoyed it for the most part. Not the best, not the worst. But definitely in terms of the premise where Corporations have essentially bought out failing governments, leading to an advanced surveillance state, and anti-corporate terrorists, etc... etc...

A combination of all the worst bits of the worst ones

"Lack of respect, wrong attitude, failure to obey authority. The Farm, immediately. - death sentence in Ellison's book 'A Boy and His Dog'

Awesome book. The whole series was good, except the last one.

Dune.

Not the cool parts, the Butlerian Jihad.

I'd have gone with WH40Ks war with the men of iron but there's absolutely no chance we reach golden age of technology levels before we fuck ourselves.

All of the negatives from Metropolis 2001

Metropolis (2001): How Capitalism Produces Fascism

The Temporal Messages of Metropolis

Elon Musk = Duke Red

Lots of good responses in this thread so far, but I keep thinking of the newest Gibson trilogy with regards to "the jackpot" where the majority of the population dies from a series of "not quite the big one" pandemics and climate issues and society is taken over by the kleptocracy. I love Gibson's books, but I wish he would stop accurately predicting our demise.

If we don't dodge that bullet, Years and Years. Or Neuromancer.

Neuromancer would be an improvement at this point. Gibson underestimated just how bad corporations could get.

The Simpsons

Can we choose? I'll pick the Matrix. Yes we are slaves to the machines, but at least they give us happy dreams

The Road.

Penultimate Truth. Predicted containing the cattle using fear of something that doesn't even exist in reality.

How far ahead do you want to go? The Borg are a more likely future phase of humanity than Star Trek's Federation, though without FTL travel, we're gonna be stuck crawling from rock to rock in our own neighbourhood for a very long time.

There's also a bit in old kid's TV show The Girl From Tomorrow where, at one point, something mucks up the timeline so badly that the future she comes from ceases to exist and all of the Earth's land ends up an uninhabitable desert, devoid of life. That seems pretty likely too.

These two things are not mutually exclusive either.

I've gotta go with Mad Max here. Between the words oil obsession, rising aggression and dumbing down of society I can't see it going any other way.

Blade Runner

I don't know about closest, but definitely most likely, Tank Girl. Basically, water and power will be extreme scarcities for the majority and a corporation that bottles up the water to keep it from becoming free through rain and owns all of central power grid will be the effective government. It will take a few more decades for the water to get bottled up by Nestlé, et al., and the water infrastructure to fail in more cities. And then the fossil fuel industry to run out of resources and collapse and thus leave only the few nuclear reactors as the only major power sources, without renewables investment, which can be grabbed by the water owners by saying they need the power to collect the water bottles and they need to "secure" the dangerous reactors with the military hardware they collected to protect "their" water sources from protesters and poor people over the years.

Contagion and Children of Men - while they didn't look far into the future and dealt with existing problems, it's still horrifyingly accurate.

Jasper: "Pull my finger"

Wall-E by way of 1984.