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........

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