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The New New

Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures

Welcome to the Sci-Fi industrial complex

Brian Merchant
OneZero
Published in
17 min readNov 28, 2018

Illustration: Nicholas Law

OOne of the most influential product prototypes of the 21st century wasn’t dreamed up in Cupertino or Mountain View. Its development began around a half-century ago, in the pages of a monthly pulp fiction mag.

In 1956, Philip K. Dick published a short story that follows the tribulations of a police chief in a future marked by predictive computers, humans wired to machines, and screen-based video communications. Dick’s work inspired a generation of scientists and engineers to think deeply about that kind of future. To adapt that same story into a $100 million Hollywood film 50 years later, Steven Spielberg sent his production designer, Alex McDowell, to MIT. There, a pioneering researcher — and lifelong Dick fan — named John Underkoffler was experimenting with ways to let people manipulate data with gloved hands. In 2002, a version of his prototype was featured in the film, where it quickly became one of the most important fictional user interfaces since the heyday of Star Trek. Bas Ording, one of the chief UI designers of the original iPhone, told me his work was inspired directly by the gesture-based system showcased in Minority Report.

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OneZero
OneZero

Published in OneZero

OneZero is a former publication from Medium about the impact of technology on people and the future. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

Brian Merchant
Brian Merchant

Written by Brian Merchant

Senior editor, OneZero, books, futures, fiction. Author of The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, founder of Terraform @ Motherboard @ VICE.

Responses (30)

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Fantastic piece. If you haven’t read Dan Wang’s essay, “Definite optimism as human capital,” you should.

effective, narratively compelling fictive worlds; it’s a bona fide (and sometimes contested) hallmark of the genre.

One of the primary reasons I don’t enjoy reading a lot of sci-fi is that they tend to get bogged down with the worldbuilding. It becomes more about the world and the way things work than about character and plot. Interesting, compelling characters…

Really enjoyed this! I think sci-fi authors have always known in some way that they are the dream architects of tomorrow. It’s interesting to see that companies are working with this now.
Not sure how I feel about that.
Also, really appreciated…