Analysis: many of today's cutting-edge technologies have been inspired by science fiction books, movies and TV shows
Science fiction is typically imagined to be concerned with advanced futuristic concepts. Many modern day technologies were "invented" in science fiction, from smart watches, virtual reality and lasers to video conferencing, wireless headphones and drones.
But science fiction's roots are often more fantastical. In some historiographies, science fiction can be traced back four thousand years to the Epic of Gilgamesh. In the intervening years, it has taken in such tales as the story of Atlantis, Dante's Divine Comedy, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Gulliver's Travels and Frankenstein.
It wasn’t really until the late 19th century that fiction begin to engage with scientific possibility. The French novelist Jules Verne was hailed as the world's first full-time science fiction novelist, and H. G. Wells created many works that seriously speculated about future technologies and their impact on society.
From Sci-Fi Central, how Jules Verne became the godfather of science fiction
An array of science fiction subgenres proliferated in the 20th century, such as Cyberpunk, social science fiction and the epic adventures of space opera, exemplified by Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dune. So called "hard" science fiction takes a rigorous approach to detail in seeking to accurately depict worlds enabled by advanced technologies, but one shouldn’t assume the boundaries between science fiction subgenres are fixed.
Creative thinking has also been applied in speculative fiction to how we make things, with many of today’s manufacturing technologies having been inspired by science fiction, in books, movies and TV shows. An increasing number of examples of industrial automation technologies that were once science fiction are now a reality. Manufacturing today is digitally enabled, driven by computing and artificial intelligence and closely associated with robotics.
Karel Čapek was a Czech writer of speculative fiction who coined the term robot in his 1920 play Rossum's Universal Robots. Isaac Asimov's Robot series explore the interaction of humans and robots. It was in these short stories and novels that he formulated his Three Laws of Robotics, which all robots in his fiction must obey, and which ensure that a robot does not turn against its creators.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Arena, Ruth Barton and Donald Clarke review Dune
These have since influenced thought on the ethics of artificial intelligence: an example of a mobile robot is the automatic guided vehicle. Philip K. Dick's 1955 short story Autofac depicts autonomous vehicles transporting parts to factories. We are already at a stage where such vehicles are efficiently operating within assembly plants and warehouses, transferring raw materials and manufactured products from one point to another within the facility, and equipped with vision systems and sensors to enable them to operate and avoid collisions in busy environments.
Compared to communicators and sensing technology, replicators are to be found towards the top end of scientific incredibility in Star Trek, according to NASA (less plausible than phasers and cloaking devices, but more conceivable than wormhole interstellar travel). But instead of something for rearranging subatomic particles and molecules to form solid organic or synthetic matter on demand, you have a tool which already has widespread industrial application today, and can mass produce all manner of parts out of a growing library of materials.
The 2002 film Minority Report has a particular salience for instances of art prefiguring life. This is in large part because Steven Spielberg assembled a committee of experts to think about technologies that would be developed by 2054, the year the film is set in. Some technologies are already in common usage, such as multi-touch interfaces, cloud computing and retina scanners.
From Rotten Tomatoes, trailer for Minority Report
The film contained creepy technologies as well, such as facial recognition advertising billboards for the purposes of personalized advertising, and the crime prediction software that is central to the plot. The latter, however, is essentially a form of "predictive analytics", which has more benign uses in modern day operations management.
Parallel universes are a familiar staple of fiction and the current Netflix series Stranger Things forms part of a long tradition. Manufacturing is increasingly dominated by its own version of the parallel universe, known as the Digital Twin. This is a virtual model, real-time digital counterpart of a physical process, product or machine, and they have widespread application in modern industry.
Many people’s conception of exoskeletons are based on the climax of Aliens, or the armour used by Iron Man, which was first described in the 1960s. They are nowadays deployed in a manufacturing context to reduce strain and fatigue for those performing repetitive and strenuous tasks on the assembly line.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Arena, Chris Wasser previews Stranger Things
Perhaps the culmination of technological deployment in manufacturing is the fully automated "lights out" factory, which do not require any on-site human presence. And yes, science fiction was there first, in the form of Otfrid von Hanstein's short story, The Hidden Colony, published in 1935.
Cyberpunk, a fusion of cybernetics and punk, has created many terms that are now part of the tech vernacular. Many terms used in tech security, critical to the digitalisation of industry, come from the 1975 John Brunner novel The Shockwave Rider, in which a man on the run uses a 'worm program' to rewrite his identity and hide from a nefarious government organisation. William Gibson, author of the influential 1984 novel Neuromancer, is credited with coining the term "cyberspace" and prefiguring the growth of virtual environments. Virtual reality interfaces have featured in many films, including The Matrix and Tron, and are increasingly of use on the factory floor.
Yet these impressive advances do not obscure great challenges that lie ahead. The current state of the world places a huge onus on manufacturing to help societies and economies respond to present day necessity and address resource scarcity and the threat of environmental and ecological breakdown. Technological advance is widely seen as critical to the need for manufacturing to avoid depleting the planet’s resources, promote cleaner and more efficient use of energy, and to foster economic resilience.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Arena, Havey O'Brien on The Matrix
Similarly, it is important to emphasise social possibilities of technologies, such as the organisation of work. The British economist John Maynard Keynes, in his 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, predicted that technological change and productivity improvements would within a hundred years eventually lead to a 15 hour working week, leaving people far more time to enjoy the good things in life. The intervening near century hasn’t provided much evidence that we are on such a trajectory, but that is arguably more attributable to a failure in the ways economies and work are organised, and the manner in which technology is deployed.
Certainly, the solving of complex problems in manufacturing and making possible a brighter future requires the stimulation of deep wells of creative thinking. In this effort, technologists and researchers will likely be dependent on the predictive and visionary powers of science fiction writers.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
