Did Waste Tide come true?
Largely, yes. Waste Tide (2013) has a P(n) of 81% on Nearfi's P(n) Board, our estimate of the chance its future arrives within 20 years. Of its 4 tracked predictions, 2 have arrived and 1 are arriving. Its central premise, 'Discarded electronics are dismantled by hand by low-paid migrant workers in a poisoned industrial town, with the profits and the harm falling on different people', has arrived. The next prediction is estimated to arrive around 2036.
Waste Tide is most prescient about its setting: the informal, toxic dismantling of rich countries' electronics by poor workers is real and growing, and moved from China to other countries when Guiyu was cleaned up. Its brain-machine link has early clinical versions, while the body-modification economy and the waste-born virus are further off.
Read the review · 7.2/10 →
How this P(n) was calculated
P(n) is the chance that this work's future arrives within 20 years, by 2046. For each prediction we turn our estimate into a probability: arrived is 100%, diverged is 0%, and otherwise the low end of our 80% range counts as a 10% chance, the median year 50% and the high end 90%. Each prediction is weighted 1–5 by how pivotal it is to the story, and P(n) is the weighted average. P50 does the same by 2076. P(n), explained.
| Claim | Prediction · why this weight | Weight | Status · estimate | By 2046 | By 2076 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WT-1 | Discarded electronics are dismantled by hand by low-paid migrant workers in a poisoned industrial town, with the profits and the harm falling on different people. Core premise: Silicon Isle and its waste people are the setting, the class system and the engine of the plot. |
5 | ARRIVED arrived 2000 | 100% | 100% |
| WT-2 | Rich countries ship their electronic waste across borders to places with weaker rules, and the trade moves when one place closes its doors. Supporting: the foreign recycler's pitch and the island's dependence on imported waste shape the politics. |
3 | ARRIVED arrived 1990 | 100% | 100% |
| WT-3 | A person can link their brain to external machines and control them directly by thought. Major: Mimi's link to machines drives the thriller plot, though the novel's version is far beyond today's devices. |
4 | ARRIVING 2036 (2030–2050) | 79% | 100% |
| WT-4 | The wealthy routinely swap body parts for cybernetic replacements, as casually as people replace phones. Texture: the island's rich are shown with replaceable parts, but the plot does not turn on them. |
2 | NEAR 2060 (2045–2090) | 13% | 71% |
| P(n) = P20 = Σ(weight × chance by 2046) ÷ Σ weight = 11.4 ÷ 14 = 81% | |||||
| P50 = 13.4 ÷ 14 = 96% | |||||
Already here today (arrived 1, arriving ½, weighted): 71%.
-
WT-1
Discarded electronics are dismantled by hand by low-paid migrant workers in a poisoned industrial town, with the profits and the harm falling on different people.
Weight 5/5 · Core premise: Silicon Isle and its waste people are the setting, the class system and the engine of the plot.
This was already true when the novel was written, which is the point. Guiyu, the real town behind Silicon Isle, had about 60,000 e-waste workers in 2005, and studies there found raised lead in children and heavy dioxin contamination. The UN's 2024 monitor says about 18 million tonnes of e-waste a year are handled mostly by the informal sector in low- and lower-middle-income countries, where the health and environmental costs largely offset the value recovered. The novel's exaggeration is the clan-and-caste structure and the virus; the working conditions are documented. 123
-
WT-2
Rich countries ship their electronic waste across borders to places with weaker rules, and the trade moves when one place closes its doors.
Weight 3/5 · Supporting: the foreign recycler's pitch and the island's dependence on imported waste shape the politics.
The trade is long established and has repeatedly shifted. After China restricted waste imports in 2018, e-waste reportedly moved to Southeast Asia, where Thai police raided a large illegal recycling site that year. The UN's 2024 monitor says e-waste shipments continue to circumvent the Basel and Bamako Conventions. The novel imagines a single island; the real trade is a moving network. 45
-
WT-3
A person can link their brain to external machines and control them directly by thought.
Weight 4/5 · Major: Mimi's link to machines drives the thriller plot, though the novel's version is far beyond today's devices.
Implanted interfaces already let paralysed people control cursors and robotic arms through imagined movement. In 2025 a UCSF team reported a participant using a robotic arm for seven months without adjustment, though with one participant, tune-ups and slow, imprecise movement. Neuralink's PRIME trial is recruiting for control of external devices. The novel goes much further, with a mind that projects itself into machines. We score only the first step, as widely available control, and not that projection. 67
-
WT-4
The wealthy routinely swap body parts for cybernetic replacements, as casually as people replace phones.
Weight 2/5 · Texture: the island's rich are shown with replaceable parts, but the plot does not turn on them.
Bionic limbs exist and a small number of patients have chosen amputation of a non-functioning hand for a bionic one, a procedure that remains contested. Ethicists now discuss whether better prosthetics change the case for elective amputation. Nothing like casual, cosmetic or status-driven replacement exists, and prostheses still lag the limbs they replace. A consumer market on that scale needs better function, cost and sensation than anything available. 89
- FOR Global e-Waste Monitor 2024: Electronic Waste Rising Five Times Faster than Documented E-waste Recycling. UNITAR, 2024-03-20. Record 62 million tonnes in 2022, only 22.3% documented as properly recycled, and about 18 million tonnes handled mostly informally in poorer countries.
- FOR Electronic waste in Guiyu. Wikipedia. About 60,000 workers in 2005 in what was once the world's largest e-waste site, with studies of children's lead exposure and dioxin contamination.
- AGAINST Electronic waste in Guiyu. Wikipedia. From 2013 the authorities moved workshops into an industrial park, so the real town's worst practices were curbed, though many areas remain contaminated.
- FOR E-waste chokes Southeast Asia. The ASEAN Post, 2018-06-29. Reports an estimated 37,000 tonnes entering Thailand in the first five months of 2018 and links the flow to China's new restrictions.
- CONTEXT Global e-Waste Monitor 2024: Electronic Waste Rising Five Times Faster than Documented E-waste Recycling. UNITAR, 2024-03-20. Says illegal shipments are a concern and continue to circumvent the Basel and Bamako Conventions.
- FOR Paralyzed man moves robotic arm with his thoughts. ScienceDaily (UCSF study in Cell), 2025-03-06. A single participant moved blocks and opened a cabinet by imagined movement; the system needed periodic recalibration and had not yet been tested at home.
- CONTEXT PRIME: An Early Feasibility Study of a Precise Robotically Implanted Brain-Computer Interface for the Control of External Devices. ClinicalTrials.gov (Neuralink Corp), 2026-01-09. An early feasibility study in people with tetraparesis or tetraplegia, recruiting, with primary completion estimated for June 2026.
- FOR Patient Elects to Have Hand Amputated to Make Way for a Bionic One. Popular Science, 2011-05-18. A surgeon in Austria replaced a functionless hand with a bionic one at the patient's request; colleagues objected.
- CONTEXT Elective amputation and neuroprosthetic limbs. The New Bioethics (Richard B. Gibson), 2021. Argues that if artificial limbs approach biological function, the case against elective amputation for people with BIID should be judged on its merits.
Ledger updated 5 Nov 2026. All works on the P(n) Board · Method