Good morning! Welcome to the last day of February. If you feel like time is moving fast, don’t worry, the future will be more epic than you can imagine if you let it be.

How do I know? Well as a futurist, I tend to study the future, with a special interest in how technology will impact our world in the years to come.

In an upcoming video, I will share with you how we can all benefit from having a futurist mindset. But until then, here is some fascinating food for thought that you can focus on right now.

Inventions that were First Imagined in Science Fiction

We often assume the technology we rely on came from the minds of genius inventors determined to solve a problem. But some ideas spring from the imaginations of creative people who have little or no expertise in design and just the ability to imagine worlds beyond the constrictions of the here and now.

Imagining the impossible has allowed science fiction writers to explore concepts and ideas previously unthought-of. Many of the inventions we use every day were inspired by the stories written many years before they were possible:

Here are 8 inventions that began life as mere science fiction…

1. Voice Control 🎙

   Voice-controlled robots such as R2-D2 from Star Wars were a mainstay of science fiction long before Apple unveiled its Siri software. It wasn’t until Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey showed a talking and responsive computer, HAL, that people began to imagine its true possibilities.

2. Automatic Doors 🚪 

   More than half a century before its invention, the automatic door appeared in HG Wells’ 1899 serialized story When the Sleeper Wakes. What was invented by Horton Automatic in 1954 has been widely used ever since.

3. Smart Watches ⏱

   For many decades, children – and possibly some adults – have imagined themselves being able to discreetly speak into their watches as though they were mobile phones, much in the same way comic-book hero Dick Tracy could.

4. Chess-Playing Computers ♟

   It wasn’t until Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey showed the supercomputer HAL playing chess against a human opponent that computer companies were inspired to design a computer capable of taking on the world’s best chess players.

5. Mobile Phones 📱 

   Star Trek imagined an early form of mobile phone. The ‘communicator’ used by Captain Kirk and his crew inspired mobile phone inventor Martin Cooper to design a portable cellular phone in the early 1970s. In 1973, his work led to the world’s first mobile phone.

6. The Internet 🌐

   Mark Twain’s short story From the “London Times” of 1904, described a phone system created to share information over a worldwide network. Twain’s invention was remarkably similar to the World Wide Web British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee designed in the early 1980s.

7. Organ Transplants 🫀 

   In Mary Shelley’s 1818 book, Frankenstein, scientist Victor Frankenstein uses dead body parts to build a man. It is thought Shelley’s story had a huge influence on the idea of organ transplantation.

8. Credit Cards 💳

   First described by novelist Edward Bellamy in his 1887 utopian book Looking Backward, the credit card has become yet another integral part of people’s lives.

- The New Economy and Business Insider

Dive Deeper:

I study the future. We should pay attention to avatars. Sinead Bovell calls attention to Shudu Gram, a computer-generated and internationally-recognized South African woman model, who was created and monetized by a white male.(TED)

Brilliant Designs to Put More People in Cities I don't believe in smart homes. That's sort of a bogus concept. I think you have to build dumb homes and put smart stuff in it. (TED)

Do Animals Plan for the Future? Even if not all animals can plan for the future, human beings can. So let’s use our powerful brains to adapt our behavior today and start planning for a future we all can share in.(Psychology Today)

Meta (fka Facebook) introduces LLaMA, a new language model AI We look forward to seeing what the community can learn — and eventually build — using LLaMA. (Meta)

Why Does Generation Z Care About the Planet Generation Z, those born in the late 1990s and early 2000s, are not shy of speaking their truth and making their mark when it comes to their concerns about sustainability. (Ulster University)

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