Long before engineers build the future, someone has to imagine it; that work often starts in fiction.

Stories give us the vocabulary to discuss technologies that don’t yet exist.

Shared visions of the future—“sociotechnical imaginaries”—shape what societies choose to build.

Our expectations shape perception: if we’re not looking for something, we may fail to see it entirely.

Sometime in the late ’90s, RoboCop was on TV right after a documentary on the future of robotics. I know because my uncle dozed off during the science bits of the first program and woke up during the second, as a cyborg was violently clearing the streets of Detroit. We were just kids, playing outside in the garden at the time.

Still only half-awake, my uncle didn’t realize how long he’d napped, or that he’d missed the considerable plot twist. Later that day, he was pretty enthused and explained to us kids that law enforcement would be handed over to robots in the not-too-distant future. We kindly laughed him out of the room, of course.

Well, who’s laughing now!

The way the future is built, as it turns out, has much to do with what people can imagine. Quite naturally, if not one person in the world can even imagine something, then it's unlikely to be invented by anyone. Conversely, if a seed of an idea enters our collective brain, even as a distant sci-fi thought, you can almost bet on it happening sooner or later—if human creativity has anything to say about it.

As Intel's first corporate futurist, Brian David Johnson was tasked with looking 10 to 15 years into the future. The 10- to 15-year horizon reflected the product cycle at the turn of the century, or roughly how long it would take to design, build, and deploy a new chip. Intel needed to know how the world would look when the new product hit the market, so engineers would know what kinds of tasks to design the chips for.

Fortune-telling is a lucrative skill, whether you're Cassandra in ancient Greece or a futurist at Intel. What’s even better than predicting the future, though, is driving it. While my uncle was mocked for unwittingly blurring the line between fiction and real life, tech companies spend a truckload of cash trying to do exactly this sort of thing, which is to deliberately use stories to explore and influence technological development.

Harvard professor Sheila Jasanoff calls this dynamic a “sociotechnical imaginary.” Inventions emerge from collectively held visions and shared stories about “futures” that circulate in the public imagination. These visions then circulate in films and stories, and eventually in policy papers and campaign speeches, long before they materialize as hardware or law. For example, before a city council can fund a robot police officer, the public needs a mental “slot” for it.

In this sense, movies like RoboCop may be complete sci-fi inventions, but they provide the vocabulary necessary for that technology to exist. They pre-populate our imagination, so that when a real opportunity arises, people recognize it—and it feels less radical, almost inevitable. My uncle wasn’t completely wrong; he was simply too early. He saw the movie and accepted its premise as entirely plausible, much earlier than anyone else began to consider the idea reasonable.

You can’t see what you can’t see

Our brains constantly filter, predict, and interpret sensory input. If something doesn’t fit our expectations or what we’re paying attention to, we can fail to consciously notice it, even if it’s right in front of us. What we expect to see determines, to a surprising degree, what we are able to see.

This phenomenon, known as “inattentional blindness,” was famously demonstrated in 1999 by two psychologists, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris. In their experiment, participants watched a video of people passing basketballs and were told to count the passes. Midway through, a person in a gorilla suit walked into the scene, stopped, beat their chest, and walked off. The gorilla was clearly visible, but because it had nothing to do with the task, the participants’ brains filtered out the incident. Many participants even reported no memory of the gorilla at all and reacted with disbelief when the footage was replayed for them.

This blindness extends far beyond visual tricks. In his landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn argues that even scientists, the most disciplined observers we have, struggle to “see” data that contradicts their current mental model. Without an explanation or framework in which the data make sense, the valuable signal is often dismissed as noise, and the scientists miss an important discovery.

This is where fiction becomes functional. It constructs those potential frameworks that are necessary to process data that doesn’t fit expectations. If we need a theory to see a fact, then science fiction can act as that provisional context, a speculative framework that allows us to categorize something as “potentially useful.” The story itself doesn’t create the innovation, but it helps us recognize one when we see it.

The writer Alex Blechman imagined a sci-fi author screaming into the void: “In my book, I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale,” only for a tech company to announce, “At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel ‘Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.’”

As they say, it’s funny because it’s true.

When my uncle woke up 30 years ago, he had inadvertently adopted a whole new framework, while the rest of us were still stuck in the old one. To us, a robot cop was as fantastical as a dragon. Today, however, we have all the context we need for an automated police force to make sense. Decades of headlines about drones, surveillance, and AI have built a mental framework ready to accommodate an intelligent robot or two.

Nevertheless, it’s best to avoid treating these fictional roadmaps as inevitable. We can only connect the dots backward, so when a potential future is presented as inevitable, it’s nothing of the sort. It’s still fair game to debate, deliberate, and course correct. Technology is never a wave simply washing over us, so always ask the all-important question: “What kind of world do we want to live in?”

Jasanoff, S., & Kim, S. H. (Eds.). (2015). Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226276663.001.0001

Johnson, B. D. (2011). Science Fiction Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction. Morgan & Claypool. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-01796-4

Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press (2012). 212 pages. ISBN 0226458148, 9780226458144

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