For Creative Inspiration, Tech Geeks Turn To Sci-Fi

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For Creative Inspiration, Tech Geeks Turn To Sci-Fi
August 21, 2010
NPR

Did you ever wonder how engineers, programmers and scientists come up with ideas for new inventions like the search engine, virtual worlds and the Internet? Does it every feel like it's all coming out of science fiction. Well, in fact, much of it does. For more than a century, inventors have been driven to create what sci-fi writers can only imagine.

As a boy in India, Amit Singhal dreamed of space, the final frontier.

"Those were my favorite times as a little child on a hot summer day sitting in a room watching Star Trek.

Singhal now works at Google where he is in charge of maintaining all of Google's search algorithms.

"But my main job is to dream what search would look like a few years from now," Singhal says.

And what are those dreams of what search will look like? Singhal thinks back to the way that Star Trek characters could talk to a computer and find out about almost anything.

"The thought of someone ... talking to a computer or so on was just so intriguing," Singhal says. "It really piqued my interest in technology and that translated into an interest in search, and for the last 20 years I've been doing search."

Singhal works on Google's voice-recognition search products. Say you're looking to buy a baseball, Singhal demonstrates by asking where the nearest Sport's Authority is, and it tells him where to turn.

Singhal is not unique. Scratch the surface of many inventors in Silicon Valley and there is a kid who loved science fiction.

"Basically, what happens is teenagers read these things, they fall in love with the novel, they get inspired by the technology and they keep in the back of their minds till they're about 30, and then they build it," says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster.

Saffo reads science fiction to help him forecast the future.

The grandfather of science fiction, Saffo says, is probably Jules Verne who wrote 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Verne's Nautilus submarine inspired the name of the first U.S. nuclear submarine.

"His novel inspires whole generations of people," Saffo says.

Since Verne, there has been a long list of inventions that come from science fiction: Buck Rogers inspired a generation of scientists excited about space exploration, Ray Bradbury predicted home-theater systems, William Gibson dreamed up the Internet while writing Neuroromancer on a manual typewriter. Not long after him, Neal Stephenson predicted virtual worlds in his 1991 novel Snow Crash. One of his readers was Philip Rosedale.

"My wife bought me the book and said, 'You're going to love this,'" Rosedale says.

Rosedale loved it so much he wanted to build a virtual world based on it. But it wasn't until the late 1990s that the technology caught up to the novel.

"You looked at that and you said, 'Well, we could actually do that. There's not really a whole lot of reasons why we couldn't do exactly what's in that book,'" he says.

Rosedale built the virtual world Second Life, which now has 1 million active users, based on the Metaverse in the novel. It has avatars that are representations of real people, signed in from their comptuers. It had virtual retail shops, bars, houses and even virtual television studios with virtual celebrites on virtual talk shows.

"I think it is pretty much what I imagined," says Snow Crash author Stephenson.

His novel inspired other inventions such as Google Earth. Engineers and programmers usually work in cubicles on narrow technical problems. Stephenson says science fiction helps them see the meaning of their work.

"It was possible for these people to see a coherently realized vision of what all of their efforts could eventually lead to," he says.

But, Snow Crash is a dark book -- the world it depicts is filled with petty criminals, violence, environmental problems and greed. In fact, talk to most science-fiction authors and they will tell you that their work is usually cautionary.

"While the futurists are plowing ahead and excited about this possibility or that possibility, we're always standing there going, 'Hang on just a second. Let's think about this a little more,'" says science-fiction author Connie Willis.

Willis, who has won numerous Nebula and Hugo awards for her work, has imagined everything from alien life forms to a Hollywood where actors are replaced with digital replicas. Willis says the gadgets and technology in science fiction are meant to intrigue, but they are really ways to talk about the present and take on hot issues that readers might otherwise avoid.

"They already think they know what they think about any given hot topic of the day," she says. "But if you can convince them that you're talking about a planet millions of miles away and hundreds of years in the future or the past you can actually get people to examine more closely what's going on right now."

But, many inventors don't like to dwell on the complexities of what they create. Google search guru Singhal looks to science fiction almost like a blueprint for a brighter future.

"Those dreams are what keep people running toward a goal," he says. "You shoot for the stars, a great thing happens. And those stars are put in our visions by all these wonderful science-fiction creators."

Singhal probably needs that positive attitude to motivate him. Willis admits the cautionary attitude of most science-fiction writers would probably keep them from actually building something new.

Ultimately, she looks to other fiction writers like William Faulkner as her guide. Faulkner said it is the job of fiction to explore the human heart, and that never changes. Copyright 2010 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

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