Does science fiction dictate the course of invention?

Question

I read an article yesterday that new advertisement bilboards have been invented that pick up signals from bluetooth moblies and project personalised advertisements addressing the person who is passing them... this is scarily similar to Philip K. Dick's vision of the future in Minority Report.

I just think it's interesting that something which starts out as part of a sci-fi story can become reality a few years later. How many other things have only been invented because somebody dreamed them up in a dystopian vision of the future?

I don't like the way things are going -it's all a bit too nineteen eighty-four-ish for me!!!

Answer 1

I find that a lot of scientist do not have much imagination as they're very factual people (I'm one of them!). This is where sci-fi writers come in as they come up with the ideas. Often these writers are interested in science and like to have plots which are at least vaguely plausible. Scientist will then pick up on this and think - "Ohh, that's a good idea. I'll try that!"

Writers need science and scientists need writers!!

Answer 2

I think it was Jules Verne that wrote
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in 1869 either wrote about or described a machine that would transport correspondence over the airwaves what we became to know as the fax machine.

Weather that was a dictate of the invention I would not no but the inventions nearly always relate from creativey based on past knowledge.

With regards to 1984 I understand the anxiety that is provoked in things like this and preminitions but so far they have always been avoided. Perhaps that is because we can see what could happen and avoid it.

Answer 3

Interesting idea.

I'm sure sci fi programmes are aware of inventions in the pipe line, or possibilities and armed with this and a bit of imagination they create tomorrows gadgets. A lot, I guess is far fetched, no Enterprises, transporters and junk yet.

I'm an archaeologist/historian and I know what you mean about technology, I'm constantly surprised when the answers I post actually appear on the screen... George Orwell, now there was a clever chap...

Answer 4

Their are so many visions of the future that their isn't much that can come about without being able to say "hey thats just like in soandso book". the reality is that most discoveries sit around waiting for applications or were created for very minor mundane reasons. The internet for example, when it was invented no one suspected it would develop in to what it is today.

The world is full of dreamers and doers and when they interact things get invented

Answer 5

I know that Arthur C Clarke was the first person to fictionally write about the communications satellite. I think that science does often follow fiction, just because there are certain things that the human race want to do. E.g. time travel. Loads written about that. One day it'll be a reality. And then I can go back in time and make sure Peter Stringfellow was never born.

Answer 6

Ohh well yes, the science fictions do effects the future ways of scientific discoveries..I love jules verne in particualr cos most of his fiction are a reality now..
a better example of the effect of fiction on real scienctific development can be summurised as.

.Robot infantry get ready for the battlefield. By Paul Marks. New Scientist (Issue 2570: page 28; subscription req'd). "'Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply.' So said the armed robot in Paul Verhoeven's 1987 movie RoboCop. The suspect drops his weapon but a fault in the robot's software means it opens fire anyway. Nearly two decades later, such fictional weapon-toting robots are looking startlingly close to reality - and New Scientist has discovered that some may eventually help to decide who is friend and who is foe. Sometime in the coming months, chances are that we'll be seeing TV reports that an armed remote-controlled robot has been used in anger for the first time. ... Both companies stress that there is always a human in control of the robots. Apart from a planned autonomous 'return home' function, neither [Foster-Miller's] Sword nor the iRobot prototype operates autonomously. Nevertheless, more complex machines may soon be on the drawing board. A research request issued in August by the Pentagon's Office of Naval Research (ONR) shows that military robots are one day going to be asked to make some important decisions on their own."
another example is--Virtual bees help robots see in 3D. By Tom Simonite. NewScientist.com news. "Copying the humble honeybee's foraging methods could give robots better 3D vision, researchers say. Robot explorers could identify points of interest by mimicking the way bees alert others of promising foraging spots. ... A new type of stereoscopic computer vision system takes inspiration from this trick. It was developed by Gustavo Olague and Cesar Puente, from the Center for Scientific Investigation and Higher Education of Ensenada (CICESE) in Mexico. ... ... The honey bee software starts by randomly assigning explorer bees to different parts of an image. ... The explorers recruit harvesters...."



Infact Science fiction reflects scientific thought; a fiction of things-to-come based on things-on-hand. And hence it is quite obvious that the fiction acts as an inspiration to the further science developments..afterall science is not at all by chance..scientific researches and discoveries are a resonabl product of thinking...

Science fiction is the search for definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould. (Trillion Year Spree: the History of Science Fiction (London, 1986))

Answer 7

I dont believe the course but perhaps the trends. Good SF writers are excellent researchers taking in vast amounts of information to sift through and identify the next technological evolutionary step as it were.
Jules Verne was the first man to envision the possibility of Space travel and submarines but he based his visions on technology available in his century, good SF takes what human inginuity is capable of and augments it with imagination is soothsaying!
Does this pre empt the coming of Big Brother - what makes you think its in the future?
Privacy and independence is becoming scarce and what we see as confidentiality may only be a thin disguise for controlled thinking and niavity on our part.
At least we'll have excellent SF to read while we're being told waht to eat and buy and watch and..um..read..

Answer 8

Not really, it's just that artistic imagination isn't limited by practicalities. So, Arthur C. Clark can dream of earth-tethered space stations and giant sails to catch the minute energy thrust of sunlight before these are actually possible. It's just that science, which is just as imaginative, relies on practicalities & proofs before they can publish.

Answer 9

I would say Sci-Fi influences developments - look at the Flip up transmitters in Star-trek very similar to some flip phones. Also sliding doors took their influence from there. There are a lot of techno geeks out there who get a lot of ispiration from Sci-Fi.

Hope this helps . . .

Answer 10

i would say necessity is the mother of all invention. sci fi just points us in different directions & gives us new ideas & different ways of looking at things. its not all bad. look at the internet (well probably a bad example there) but we couldn,t do without technology at the moment.