Samiul Bashar Samin
Picture yourself in a supermarket aisle in 2050. These new ‘magic meatballs’, brightly coloured for the kids, seem worth a try.
Better have some of the meat powder too, one of the more established products from the mass-manufacturers of cultured meat – you can make that creamy meat-based fondue that always satisfies. You don’t fancy the meat ice-cream today, but there’s still time left for a trip to the deli counter, for some expensive, but delicious ‘rustic’ meat, matured in special vats, or perhaps some knitted steaks. And you can pile your cart secure in the knowledge that no animals were harmed in the making of any of these offerings.
Often the imaginings of sci-fi and technology work as an echo-chamber, reflecting ideas back and forth, with tech innovators claiming sci-fi inspiration as a way of communicating what their devices might do. Martin Cooper, the US engineer who led the team behind the first cell phone – demonstrated in 1973 – happily told reporters it was inspired by the Star Trek communicator; yet, at the time, he had been working for Motorola on hand-held police radios, and the mobile phone was a simple extension of that idea. But name-checking Star Trek was a good way to get people’s attention.
Sci-fi media can be astonishingly effective at promoting possible technologies. This takes on a new dimension in film, which trades in realistic depictions of new tech to underpin fictional worlds. Sometimes this cinematic realism is directly exploited by innovators.
Design fiction with a less critical (and more commercial) edge will continue to appeal to innovative corporations anxious to configure new offerings to fit better with as yet undefined markets. Their overriding aim is to reduce the chances of an innovation being lost in the ‘valley of death’ between a bright idea and a successful product that preys on the minds of budget-holders.
But the greatest potential of this new way of working is as a tool for those who want to encourage a more important debate about possible futures and their technological ingredients. This is the debate we’re still too often not having, about how to harness technological potential to improve the chances of us living the lives we wish for.