Science, storytelling and the future

Science fiction and storytelling are powerful tools for encouraging more creative and ambitious thinking about the future, argues Ed Finn, director of ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination, in an interview with BBC News. The center is featured in an article that considers whether scientists and technologists need science fiction to inspire new projects.

The article features perspectives from a number of science and technology luminaries, including venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel; entrepreneur, engineer and Singularity University co-founder Peter Diamandis; angel investor John Taysom; Harvard chief technology officer Jim Waldo; neuroscientist Susan Greenfield; and documentary filmmaker Jason Silva of the National Geographic Channel TV show "Brain Games."

Finn argues that our ambitious visions of the future have dimmed. In the United States, for example, we have gone from the Apollo missions and massive infrastructure projects in the 1950s and 1960s, to ending human space flight and continuing to drive on 50-year-old bridges today. The Center for Science and the Imagination believes that science fiction can inspire scientists, engineers, politicians and citizens to think about the future in more optimistic and constructive ways.

The center’s Project Hieroglyph teams up top science fiction authors with scientists, engineers and other researchers to envision a near future radically changed by technological innovation. “Our goal is to try and expand the horizon, to consider the full possibility space of what we could do,” says Finn. “It’s about changing the story we tell ourselves about the future.”