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em-beelast Tuesday at 11:03 PM1 replyview on HN

while i agree in principle, you seem to make it sound like without a science fiction story, some things would not have been invented. but i disagree with that. the thing is that science fiction is the imagination of humans of how the future could look like but new ideas in tech come from the same source. that is, while star trek may have predicted phones and tablets they were not invented because of star trek. they would have been invented anyways simply because it is part of the imagination of humans. just like multiple authors can come up with the same plot lines or settings, multiple people can invent the same tech.

science fiction represents the full breath of human inventiveness, and tech inventions the part that can realistically be built. in that sense the first airplane was also inspired by historical scifi

basically, someone has an idea, and either, like you, they write about it, or, if it is realistic enough, and they know how to do it, they set out to build it. and any idea that is written about but can be realized (and is practical enough to be useful) will eventually be realized. but ideas are cheap, and i feel we give far to much credit to people having an idea because a thousand others probably had the same idea, but only a few write about it and a few more are able to build it, while the remaining 995 stay silent and do nothing about it.

what makes scifi interesting is to predict inventions that at the time can't yet be realized: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_existing_technologies_...

so i credit star trek not for inspiring the tablet, but for predicting it, and more so, for popularizing the idea. the flip phone less so, because the original communicator is just a wireless handset with a cover. very different from what a flip phone actually does. (you'll notice that the flip phone is not listed in the above wikipedia page, and even the tablet has been described more than a decade before it appeared in star trek TNG)


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ednitelast Wednesday at 12:06 AM

I get what you’re saying, and it makes total sense. I’d lean toward it being the best (and worst) of both worlds: sometimes stories spark inventions, sometimes inventions spark stories, and we can probably agree it’s rarely just one-way.

In my case, my imagination pulled me into writing, where I conjure things up, so I definitely feel that inspirational side, even if the ideas themselves aren’t always “original.” To the creator, though, they can feel original.

As I write fiction, I notice I often end up predicting futures where humans might go next. So you’re right, writing can be as much about prediction as inspiration. But I also like to think that, every now and then, a truly new paradigm emerges, something unpredictable, that most people didn’t even realize was needed until it existed. Sometimes, society doesn’t know what it needs until it’s already here.

Thanks for the link, really interesting list!

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