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The sci-fi legends who shaped today's tech

Posted on 20 Nov 2009 at 16:17

Sound familiar? In 2006, Keyhole co-founder John Hanke, now employed by Google, told O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference that Google Earth had its origins in a conversation with some guys from Silicon Graphics. “They said, you know, ‘you’ve probably read Snow Crash’ and I said ‘yeah’ and I had, and they said ‘well, you know that thing that the character uses, that Earth thing, where it’s there in 3D and he can just dive in and get information’. They said ‘We can build that’.”

Finally, consider that Snow Crash was required reading for the team working on Microsoft’s Xbox 360. In fact, the console’s prime architect, J Allard, uses the name of the hero as his Xbox Live ID. You can easily see the book’s influence in its emphasis on public profiles, renown (in the form of achievements and gamer points) and community features. A quick look at Sony’s Home virtual world on the PlayStation 3 reveals that Snow Crash’s influence isn’t only confined to Microsoft consoles.

Tomorrow's prophets

I made some predictions, thinking that in ten years they’d either be laughable or they’d have come true. The weird bit? Most of them came true already, by 2009!

Since Snow Crash, no novel has had quite the same impact on the computing world, and you might argue that sci-fi and hi-tech are drifting further apart. Sci-fi seems to be following the lead of Iain M Banks and Alastair Reynolds into takes on galactic exploration, all-knowing AIs and the technologically and genetically enhanced “post-human” condition. In fact, writers such as William Gibson and Charles Stross have spoken of the difficulties of writing near-future sci-fi in a world where the future accelerates towards us at such a prodigious rate.

As Stross told PC Pro: “Back in 2005 I began writing a novel, Halting State, about the future of MMOs and the gaming industry. It came out in 2007, and was set about a decade out – around 2018. I made some predictions, thinking that in ten years they’d either be laughable or they’d have come true. The weird bit? Most of them came true already, by 2009!”

Yet Stross believes that there’s still a relationship between sci-fi and real-world technology. “There’s definitely feedback going on,” he adds. “I get invited to tech conferences and get fan mail from readers who are interested in the ideas in my fiction – in some cases to the extent of basing business ideas on them.” Stross, like popular blogger and Wired pundit, Cory Doctorow, now effectively doubles as a sci-fi author and futurologist, creating fictional worlds yet also helping to change what happens in real companies.

And this is probably science fiction’s biggest achievement. Chris Bishop, chief research scientist at Microsoft, doesn’t believe that sci-fi stories can be traced directly to goods coming off the production line, but he argues that it “often provides the mechanism that brings ideas to the public attention for the first time”.

“Take, for example, multitouch interactive displays,” he said. “Many people saw these for the first time in the Tom Cruise film Minority Report. The ideas go back many years before the film, but it took advances in processor power and display technology to allow these ideas to be turned into working devices. So science fiction does a good job of whetting people’s appetite for what might be possible.”

Yet the film wasn’t relying entirely on the imagination of its creators: John Underkoffler, technical advisor on the film, had been working on a similar gestural interface technology at MIT. However, it was only when Minority Report was shot, and others saw Underkoffler’s work, that he was put in a position where he could, one day, make it a mass market product. Sometimes the truth really is stranger than fiction.

Author: Stuart Andrews