The power of science fiction in building futures and technologies

People often ask me how I started working in futurism or futurology, what courses I took, and what skills are required. Well, as this is a multidisciplinary and multifaceted field, I found a point of interest in the relationship between science fiction and science that had spontaneously emerged back in college, when I did my undergraduate research on the Japanese animation Serial Experiments Lain, in 2009.

That was where I began researching how a 1998 work already spoke of a potential technology equivalent to Wi-Fi (when this technology did not yet exist outside of a few academic and technical studies) or anticipated what Elon Musk aims to create with his Neuralink initiative: the merging of human and machine through neural implants.

And this led to an event, Science’n’Fiction, in 2010, where I was still drafting this sci-fi/sci-fact relationship with the help of science fiction researchers and scientists interested in the topic, as well as members of fan communities who also reinforced the importance of and engagement with speculation surrounding science and technology.

Later, in 2016, it was during a conversation about an event I wanted to cover for a website that I found myself a speaker on a panel discussing how virtual reality and its devices had already been imagined and explored in science fiction, from Cronenberg to Ready Player One (at the time, just the book). And, upon meeting a professional who called herself a futurist, I realized that this might be the path for investing my knowledge and my passion for science fiction—whether as an author or as a researcher.

Anyway, I’m digressing because, just as I identified back in 2016 a way to rework my academic research and transform it into new research on future scenarios, researchers Philipp Jordan, Omar Mubin, Mohammad Obaid, and Paula Alexandra Silva from the University of Hawaii also published last month a article that addresses the importance of science fiction as a reference for the development of literature on human-machine interaction technologies.

The work of these researchers was featured in an MIT Technology Review post, which brought up some of the same references I usually usewhen contextualizing this relationship between science fiction and science: the geostationary satellites created by science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke (who was also a mathematician and physicist), the communicators from Star Trek that gave rise to today's cell phones (and, previously, the Motorola device that paid homage to the series with the name StarTac), as well as the disobedient robots from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner, which received a new version last year to think even further ahead, since we already have many of those scenarios and technologies imagined in the 1980s turned into reality or, at least, in testing.

Despite these examples, it is difficult to quantify how much this relationship has actually impacted technological innovations. As noted by MIT Technology Review, “technologists would love to better understand the way fiction influences the development of new technologies.” With the paper Exploring the Referral and Usage of Science Fiction in HCI Literature, however, we learn how this interaction has been of great importance throughout history, as well as how it has been increasingly intensifying in recent years.

To prove this, the researchers analyzed papers presented at one of the most important conferences in the field of human-computer interaction, the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The group then searched for which papers presented there, since 1982, contained terms related to science fiction in order to categorize them.

“They found that researchers use science fiction in several different ways. One is for theoretical research in design. Another is to refer to and explore new forms of human-computer interaction, which researchers increasingly think is being shaped by science fiction books and movies. Then there is the study of human body modification, which is perhaps best explored through the medium of fiction.”

In the paper, the authors point out that “science fiction films, series, or stories really offer inspiration for past and future human-computer interaction challenges, for example through the discussion of mutable interfaces, implants, or the ethics of the digital afterlife.”

As also observed by the researchers, more than before, scientists today look increasingly to science fiction as a way to understand contemporary issues and those yet to come. “We speculate that the explicit reference to science fiction in human-computer interaction research represents only a fraction of the true inspiration and impact it has,” they write.

For MIT Technology Review, the paper took a step forward in understanding this complex relationship between science fiction and science or, more specifically, how human imagination impacts the way we develop the technology that will, eventually, become real. “In fact, technology companies increasingly employ futurists who use science fiction as a means to explore potential new technologies and their social impacts. They call this science fiction prototyping.”

With UP, or more specifically UP Future Sight, we are building ourselves as a Brazilian hub that has been using futurist thinking combined with science fiction as a way to prototype and visualize scenarios, whether through research, experience development, and content production, as well as design fiction, a discipline that was, in fact, created by a science fiction author (Bruce Sterling).

That is, such questions stem from the notion of how important the science fiction genre is at a time when technology has become an integral part of our lives.

When we watch movies like Gravity or series like Mr. Robot, we tend to think of them as science fiction because they focus on a narrative centered around technology. However, these are stories—fictions that start from our current context, where technology permeates every aspect of our lives. At the same time, there is no concern here with speculating about the future, but rather with demonstrating how we live and relate to one another in a hyperconnected world that is, consequently, permeated by technology. To reach this point, however, we first had to imagine and prototype; it is the power of fiction that allows us to visualize what we will more easily be able to bring to life in the near future.