Using science fiction to predict the future

OK, that's not really what it's for - but a news study shows how we could use it that way

The invention of the bicycle boosted women’s rights. The invention of the car led to edge-of-town retail parks. The social transformations induced by smart phones are too numerous to list. And as for social media: “Imagine that behavioural scientists managed to predict the effect of social media on mental health and democratic life before social media actually existed”, a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin ask in a recent paper in Nature. If we had known what they could possibly lead to, perhaps we might have designed and regulated social media differently, so that we did not have to now be playing catch-up with their effects.

Tech designers and companies are notoriously poor at anticipating the unintended consequences of their products, whether for better or worse or perhaps just for different. The cynic might say they simply don’t care, and the cynic has a point. But for the marketing opportunities alone, you’d imagine developers would like to know these things. Governments, ethicists, and regulators certainly should.

But isn’t the prediction of new technologies before they are even invented the business of science fiction, not of science? Well, after a fashion. Some of the best science fiction is not so much about dreaming up futuristic technologies but imagining the kinds of societies they will engender. In 1968 the sci-fi writer Frederick Pohl wrote that “Somebody [it was apparently Isaac Asimov] once said that a good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.” H. G. Wells used what he admitted was just a bit of sciencey “jiggery-pokery” to turn a man invisible; his interest was in what invisibility would do to a person. (Like Plato, he concluded that it would be morally corrupting.)

The Berlin team, led by Syrian-Australian information scientist Iyad Rahwan, has now proposed to “turn the thought experiments of science fiction into behavioural experiments”: to apply the techniques of the social sciences to the imaginings of sci-fi futurism, in the hope of gaining insights into innovative tech avant la lettre. They call this the “science fiction science method”.

The key point, they say, is that new technologies don’t just change what people can do but what they actually do do, and what they think it is acceptable to do. The female contraceptive pill was a good example: introduced as a convenient method of family planning, it altered sexual behaviour far beyond the nuclear family.

Some new technologies are mooted explicitly with social agendas in mind – and all too often by scientists with no knowledge of human behavioural science who suppose that of course everyone will adopt the tech in precisely the way they imagine. When ectogenesis – gestation of human foetuses in artificial wombs – was discussed in the 1920s by biologists such as J. B. S. Haldane and Julian Huxley, it was with eugenic goals. They welcomed the emancipation of women but feared it would lead to a decline in breeding among the “right kind of people” as woman eschewed child-rearing duties for a fulfilling career. The answer was to outsource pregnancy to the machine. Needless to say, it was left to Julian’s brother Aldous in 1931 to provide a sci-fi vision of what such a world might really be like: ironically brave and new.

It's not hard to see how such considerations might apply today to plausible-but-not-yet-extant technologies such as organ regeneration, embryo gene-editing and reproductive cloning – and indeed to ectogenesis itself, which remains to topic of research. But when efforts to anticipate societal effects rely on imagination alone, there is a danger that we fall back on old cultural tropes and prejudices, such as notions of what is “unnatural”. What Rahwan and colleagues suggest is instead a programme of carefully designed behavioural experiments to find out how people will really think and act if faced with such technologies, and what trade-offs they will be willing to accept. Such information could have been very valuable in assessing, for example, responses to a pandemic lockdown before it happened. As it was, scientific advisers seemed to rely on little more than gut instinct (“people won’t stand for it for long”).

New technologies, including virtual-reality simulation and AI, can enhance the realism of such behavioural simulations. In an extreme case, studies like the European-Russian Mars500 collaboration have placed volunteers in extended close confinement to examine the psychological effects of lengthy human spaceflight. The Berlin team recommends that experiments stick to near-future technologies: exploring the influence of AI on self-driving vehicles, say, rather than civilization-changing scenarios. I’d add one more recommendation: include artists, writers, poets and other creatives all the way through.