On the surface, science fiction—with its futuristic and/or alien settings, spaceships, robots, and rayguns—seems like the most escapist of genres. But the truth is that sci-fi has been responsible for advancements across the board in society, or so NPR’s Laura Sydell claims in “Sci-Fi Inspires Engineers To Build Our Future”.
As a boy in India, Amit Singhal dreamed of space, the final frontier. “Those were my favorite times as a little child on a hot summer day, sitting in a room watching Star Trek,” he says.
Singhal now works at Google, where he is in charge of maintaining all of Google’s search algorithms. “But my main job is to dream what search would look like a few years from now,” he says.
And what do those dreams look like? Singhal was intrigued by the way Star Trek characters simply talk to a computer to find out about almost anything, so now he’s working on Google’s voice-recognition search products.
The Star Trek world “really piqued my interest in technology,” Singhal says. “And that translated into an interest in search, and, for the last 20 years, I’ve been doing search.”
This reminds me of an anecdote from a developer of a music-sharing tool—the name escapes me, unfortunately—about how his initial inspiration came, at least partially, from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which a character was able to pull up any music they wanted from the Enterprise‘s computer.
Science fiction is wonderful at engaging our imagination and inspiring us to reach out for new horizons—which translates into new technology, inventions, and perspectives. What’s more, it can foretell the future, in a way, by looking at current trends in technology and society and imagining their potential ends.
Several years ago, I attended a L’Abri conference where the primary theme was exploring our rapidly changing concepts of humanity in an age where so many things—e.g., robotics, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering—challenge traditional definitions of humanity. In hindsight, we should’ve watched Ghost In The Shell, which deals with this very theme in some very thought-provoking and mind-blowing ways.
In this sense, science fiction and its creators can serve as a prophet of sorts, by giving us glimpses into potential futures—futures that science fiction itself is helping to shape. However, science fiction serves another prophetic purpose, which Sydell explores near her article’s end.
...talk to most science fiction authors, and they will tell you that their work is usually cautionary.
“While the futurists are plowing ahead and excited about this possibility or that possibility, we’re always standing there going, ‘Hang on just a second. Let’s think about this a little more,’” author Connie Willis says.
Willis, who has won numerous Nebula and Hugo awards for her work, has imagined everything from alien life forms to a Hollywood where actors are replaced with digital replicas. Willis says the gadgets and technology in science fiction are meant to intrigue, but they are really ways to talk about the present and take on hot issues that readers might otherwise avoid.
“They already think they know what they think about any given hot topic of the day,” she says. “But if you can convince them that you’re talking about a planet millions of miles away and hundreds of years in the future or the past you can actually get people to examine more closely what’s going on right now.”
The Old Testament’s prophets weren’t necessarily concerned with the future so much as they were concerned with the present. They raised moral, ethical, and spiritual questions within the populace, challenged corrupt power structures, and sought to make people rethink how and why they were living.
Science fiction can also play this sort of prophetic role. I read an essay by Karl Sabbagh that theorized that someday, it may be possible to discover the exact thought patterns that make violent acts—e.g., rape, murder, terrorism—acceptable to the one thinking them. And once those patterns were identified, technology such as chemical suppressants introduced into the world’s water and food supplies or genetic modification could be used to remove those patterns.
My first thought after reading the essay was “I liked this better when it was called A Clockwork Orange.” Sabbagh’s solution to the eternal problem of humanity’s tendency towards violence sounded like the nefarious plans of a totalitarian government from any number of sci-fi novels, movies, etc.
And recently, the U.S. Marine Corps announced that they were researching the use of robots in combat training, robots that use artifical intelligence to develop their own tactics and alliances in order to give human soldiers more realistic simulations.
Can anyone say “Judgment Day”?
We live in a world that is changing at a rate that would’ve been inconceivable even 20 years ago. New technologies are emerging every day, technologies that have the potential for tremendous good but that also carry with them severe ethical and moral questions (stem cell research being an obvious example). And oftentimes, it seems like noone is asking and pondering those questions. Rather, the position taken is that if we can do something—i.e., if we have the ability, know-how, and expertise—then that’s the only justification we need for doing it. No thought is given to whether we should or ought to do it.
At the risk of sounding facetious, it makes me wish more people read and watched sci-fi—if only because artists (e.g., authors, filmmakers) can be so adept at asking the big questions, at taking that sort of prophetic role in society. Again, I refer to Ghost In The Shell, which explores the spiritual ramifications of changing the body too much with technology, the changing nature of politics when sovereign nations are linked by a borderless internet. Or Blade Runner, which raises questions about the responsibilities we have to the machines we create. Dune explores, in a tangential way, the moral and spiritual implications of genetic engineering. Snow Crash looks at, in a satirical manner, a future where advertising, corporations, and technology have run amok. And the list goes on and on.
While science fiction can ignite our imagination, I believe that it can also have a similar, albeit more subtle, effect on our conscience as well… if we choose to look past the spaceships and aliens.
