The dance between Innovation and Sci-fi

“ …but there moved swiftly to support their lord handmaidens wrought of gold in the semblance of living maids. In them is understanding in their hearts, and in them speech and strength, and they know cunning handiwork by gift of the immortal gods. These busily moved to support their lord…”

Homer, Iliad, Book 18

What is Homer talking about? Who are those handmaidens made of gold and capable of understanding, speech, and strength, and handiwork, helping the godsmith Hephaestus do his job?

Or what are they?
To me, and not only, they are unequivocally robots, and unless we believe that aliens are at the origin of human civilisation and therefore robots something Homer witnessed, we need to admit that he (or they) was able to imagine mechanised beings 2.700 years before us.

Now let’s move eastwards to India, and read a few verses from the Ramayana, one of Hindus sacred text (4th century BCE), 5th book:
“There the great Hanuma saw a great aerial car, the best among the best of aerial cars, shining with the name of Pushpaka with the rays of precious stones, and capable of traveling long distances.”
These are the Vimanas, flying chariots capable of traveling great distances and carrying more people.

Could we consider these – or Mythology altogether – the first sci-fi texts?
I don’t have the competences to make the bigger claim, and I guess predicting the future was not among the many functions of myths, but definitely, if we don’t belong to one of the Area 51 many sects, this ability of imagining things well beyond what was known and possible is striking.

What has always triggered my curiosity since the first reading of Jules Verne’s ‘From the earth to the moon’, and its sequel, ’Around the Moon’, was the ability to envision not just objects, tools and machines long to come, but events and achievements, that the sci-fi writers, and later movie directors always proved to be able to do. In the afore mentioned books it’s not just a “projectile” flying to our satellite that is imagined, but the entire endeavour, the context (including the space suits), and the arising questions, more than 100 years before it actually happened.

It’s incredible how many real innovation they were able to dream up decades before the real things.
Verne wrote as well of the (atomic?) submarine in his ’20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’, of the tasers (electric rifles), of electric-powered vehicles.
Even Salgari, the Italian adventure writer, mostly known for his pirates’ novels, wrote in his book ‘The wonders of 2000’ about something very similar to flatscreen televisions, air travel, video communication, high-speed trains, ATMs, and Environmental Control Systems.

And the list of what “sci-fictionist” have been able to predict can continue
endlessly: virtual reality, William Gibson, space travel, H.G. Well (after Verne), Artificial Intelligence, A.C. Clark and I. Asimov, Gesture-based computing, Spielberg and P.K. Dick, Satellites, A.C. Clark, Voice2text, Asimov…

Of course they got also something wrong, at least for the moment, flying cars, teleportation, time-travel, androids, life creation…

What instead about science ability to make predictions? The almighty science, and her stepsister, technology, have a more dubious track record.
Yes they predicted self-driving cars, touchscreens, GPS, but the number they got wrong, especially in the far future is even higher.
From the grand undertakings like heavier-than-air flying objects considered
impossible by the likes of Lord Kelvin, and so was for Intercontinental radio
communication, supersonic flight, manned missions in the space, the Y2K bug…
To the everyday little things, like the paperless office, the nuclear-powered
vehicles, to the 3D televisions…

How is it possible? And how is it possible that many of the things science and technology made were those already thought of in sci-fi works?

By now you should know where I’m coming from, and might object that the entire comparison is out of place, why juxtapose the results of phantasy exercises with those of hard science and technology?
After all, what technology makes is beyond any doubt possible, while sci-fi is at best a wild guess.

Still you would be surprised by how many scientists and technologists read
regularly sci-fi and are inspired by it.
And it’s not a case that many sci-fi writer were and are scientists or engineer
themselves: Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Sagan, to name but a few…

Indeed you might find the discussions on the MIT Technology Review and the Engineering Institute of Technology websites quite enlightening about the interplay between the genre and the STEMS.

This means that there is a clear feedback loop between them and not a linear relation, where sometimes science speculations influence the work of the authors and sometimes the contrary.
And this is the first level at which science fiction contributes to technological development, functioning as a sort of challenge, that is often taken up by scientists and technologists.

Indeed as Einstein famously said: Imagination is more important than
knowledge.
Too often science and technology were and are trapped inside the paradigms that generate them and therefore unable to break free, whereas phantasy is naturally unconstrained by the limits of what is known.

This is what brought Arthur C. Clarke to say that "If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong".

Like in the past today technology is still bound to what is considered possible, but at the same time it is bolstered by the cross-fertilisation among different domains, receiving an acceleration which compresses the distance from the future, "preventing us from imagining its far more numerous, complex, and ultimately stimulating possibilities, possible futures requires a minimum gap from now to be ‘dreamt’ " as my friend Giorgio Di Tullio more effectively describes it.

It becomes a value in itself and unto itself to the point that for many people, even more those working in domains where its speed is highest, consider it synonymous of innovation and are surprised when it is rejected by “the market” or when it goes well beyond initial expectations.

It’s no coincidence that many industry leaders over the years have failed to
understand the developments of their own industries. From Ken Olsen, the genius founder of Digital claiming that there was no reason anyone would want a computer in their home, to Steve Balmer predicting a complete failure of the Iphone launch…

The problem, the biggest one, is its very finite nature, since it exists in the actual tools that it produces, and has a scope mostly limited to its applications.
But a technological and scientific advancement only becomes an innovation if it creates value, and value can only be judged by its impact on the human society or parts of it.

The point is that we live in a complex world where emergence, and its peaks, the black swans, are the rule.
Therefore the question goes well beyond the apparatuses and their functional applications, which can be to a certain extent forecasted (unless for serendipitous alternative usages), into the influence they can have on the society as a whole, where no forecast is possible – no offence to the economists, whose failure to predict with a decent degree of approximation would get anybody fired in other industries.

We need to regain the ability to see the bigger picture and here is the second level at where sci-fi can be of help.

Again, if an expert of the genre want’s to step in and correct what I’m about to say, please do so, and let’s make this a real conversation. But my idea of how good sci-fi works is to make some often wild, technological premises, that once accepted carry us in a very consistent world based on those.

This means that the possible outcomes are unravelled within a tangle of relations at all different levels: human to human, human to machine (how to forget the exchange between Hal and Dave in 2001: A space odyssey), and machine to machine.

Of course these are “mere” speculations, but the outright failure of forecasting (think of Brexit, Trump, Ukraine war, Covid pandemic impact…), requires a different approach to the future.

It’s what we call fore-sighting, where the challenge is not accurate (and impossible) number predictions, but rather qualitative and explorative scenarios, workshops, and expert opinions to examine possible future trends and disruptions, in order to prepare and shape future developments.

This is a game changer for strategic planning and policy-making, that have no longer to indicate how companies and organisations need to move to win in clearly defined markets, but rather select those course of actions that help them to thrive or at least survive in most scenarios.

I start many innovation or strategy assignments by showing some episode of Black Mirror. The tv series dystopian plots are a perfect example of how to imagine the future escaping from the traditional and ineffective business planning.

Indeed to imagine the future we want and make it happen we ned to think like a sci-fi author.

Cover image: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Acknowledgment: P. McCullough (STScI)