Look to the future: on science fiction and its authors

It used to be the domain of science fiction writers to speculate on what the future holds for us humans.

September 18, 2017 06:00 pm | Updated 08:30 pm IST

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It used to be the domain of science fiction writers to speculate on what the future holds for us humans. They often got it right too. The idea of credit cards pops up in an 1888 Edward Bellamy novel called Looking Backward: 2000-1887 . Jules Verne sent men to the moon in a rocket, and under the seas in a submarine, decades before either of those became reality. Aldous Huxley thought up antidepressants in his Brave New World . HG Wells, of course, was the master of getting these things right. Smartphones in Men Like Gods of 1923, television in 1899’s When The Sleeper Wakes , laser weapons in 1897’s The War of the Worlds , atomic bombs in 1914’s The World Set Free , military tanks in 1903’s The Land Ironclads , and so on. Heck, John Brunner’s 1969 classic Stand on Zanzibar even had a President of the USA named Obomi!

However, most science fiction authors decry that it is their job to invent the future. They just want to tell a good story, they all say. One set of people who however are happy to lay claim to inventing the future are entrepreneurs. What most entrepreneurs actually do is to find a product or a service, match it to a market that needs it, and make some money off it. Some, of course, do it by finding a better way of doing something that has been traditionally done in an inefficient manner — hailing cabs, ordering food, or in the case of my startup, buying building materials. While a lot of it is just about tinkering with the present, sometimes entrepreneurs do end up innovating at a level that they can genuinely lay claim to be inventing the future. An obvious example is Elon Musk of course, with his electric cars and hyperloops.

Since I am given to flights of fancy, I decided to come up with what might be some interesting business ideas where my success metric would be that my startup’s product or service will be something that will be commonplace in 2050. In a sense, if I were writing this article in 1983, I would have done a great job if I talked about mobile phones, constant connectivity to the Internet and the ease of access to information it brings about. So here are my top three.

One, devices like smartphones, smart watches etc that generate their own power and do not need to be charged. Ever. Two, and this may be something that a Bengalurean will definitely come up with, given the traffic woes in this city, a way to eliminate traffic jams. One way to do this can be that every user before getting onto the road uploads data about where he wants to get to and at what time, and a centralised system based on all the data it has, can plan every individual user’s usage of the roads — what route should be taken, and so on. Three, and I reach into science fiction again for this one, an instant and universal translator. Allowing any two people to communicate without the need for a common language. We seem to be halfway there with this idea, with gizmos like Ili, which achieves this, but in only one direction and in a clunky manner.

While it is unlikely I am going to be doing any of this, I hope some entrepreneur does it soon enough. Here’s to inventing the future.

Thejaswi Udupa heads product and technology for an online building materials marketplace

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