Science fiction's influence on technology: ideas made real

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The Consumer Electronics Show's (CES) myriad strands of conference sessions sometimes throw up the most unusual panels. One such event brought together a journalist, a science fiction writer, an inventor and an actress to talk about the influence of science fiction on the world of technology. The conversation ranged from the optimistic to the dystopian, and from the flying car to the handheld communicator.

Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, was sceptical about the role of science fiction. "The subtlety of the real world and nature and the surprising things in real science generally are even more exciting than the other stuff." But he also saw it "as a very valuable tool that will bring people to the table."

One influence kept coming back - Robert A. Heinlein's novels. Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson reminisced: "When I was a kid I read all of the usual suspects - the golden age writers - the one who stuck with me was Heinlein. I don't know why that is, but he stuck with me more than the others did."

The Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg brought up the best-known influence: Star Trek. "All you need to do is look at gadgets - you can absolutely trace the inspiration of devices like the flip cellphone. I think there are billions of dollars of R&D that have been influenced by what they saw - people trying to build transporters and computers you can talk to," he said. Indeed, last year Google's chief technologist Michael T. Jones admitted that Google Maps on the iPhone was his first attempt at creating a tricorder.

Interestingly, many of the terms we use in IT security come from The Shockwave Rider, a book by 1970s British science fiction writer John Brunner. One of a series of novels covering themes he felt were affecting civilisation - from a violent society to over population and pollution - it depicts a networked society where a man on the run uses a 'worm program' to rewrite his identity and hide from a nefarious government organisation. Brunner's book quickly became popular with the nascent IT industry, and the terms he invented became part of the vernacular. Influences run in both directions. The ubiquitous 'helpline' in the book was based on the real-world Point Foundation, the home of the counter-culture Whole Earth Catalogues - which later founded The Well, one of the first public bulletin board services to connect to the wider internet.

But science fiction isn't a tool for prediction, it's for telling stories and actress Lucy Lawless, who appears in the current remake of Battlestar Galactica, thinks it could do better. "Too much time is spent time working with wiz bang things - instead of thinking about the water machine [and] building cities," she said. "These are the inventions that transform lives."

But the worlds of science fiction and popular science magazines don't get things right much of the time. Mossberg pointed to the example of the videophone, saying "The video phone was shown at world fairs and in films, but it took Skype and the internet - which weren't predicted."

There are many things science fiction doesn't predict. The Sci-Fi channel's executive vice president Dave Howe points out that Jules Verne thought that submarines would use plants to generate oxygen but he didn't come up with the light bulb, invented only a few years later. Award-winning British science fiction writer Charles Stross agrees that science fiction isn't always the crystal ball some might perceive it to be. "In general science fiction is rather crap at predicting tech, especially the kind of baroque, reticulated weirdness that keeps coming out of CES and those weird Chinese factories who bring us stuff like USB-powered desktop missile launchers," he said.

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