Spies Like Us skewers this quite well.

Yeah, speculative fiction causes people to speculate. That’s what it’s for.

Ronald Reagan?! The actor?!?

Are they saying that the president that named the Strategic Defense Initiative as “Star Wars” was deeply influenced by sci fi?

Yep. He even requested recommendations from SciFi authors of the time who were part of the Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy.

Reagan’s search for space-based options to enhance America’s military had context prompted the Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy to convene at [Larry] Niven’s house. [Jerry] Pournelle chaired the meeting, and the result of a three-day weekend was an ominously titled document: “Space: The Crucial Frontier.”

Pournelle’s preamble for the policy, published in 1981, calls space “our most valuable natural resource” and a place that opens up “significant and possibly decisive military and economic advantages.”

“We worked all weekend and produced a paper for the transition team, then at the president’s request we started in on a plan for after inauguration at another meeting,” Pournelle wrote on his blog. “The president read the full reports, which strongly recommended Strategic Defense. In 1983 he made his Star Wars speech. It included several phrases from the Council reports.”

His economic and social policies were informed by dystopian sci-fi

Both Reagan and the orange pedophile are severely demented.

WarGames pretty much defined what hacking was until the late 90s. Any business and organization that didn’t change policy because of WarGames was going to feel pain.

You should check out him and his wife and their psychic.

At that time, nobody had an idea how much time there would be left until AI could have such abilities as shown in the movie.