For much of the twentieth century, Science Fiction (SF) was regarded as entertainment, a source of inspiration for scientists and engineers, or, at best, a social commentary. Simultaneously, on a deeper level, writers and filmmakers of SF created a shared imaginary landscape of the future, populated by space colonies, artificial minds and uploaded consciousness. These imaginaries became part of the cultural memory of their (predominantly Western) audience and shaped the expectation of what is to come.

For example, during the space race of the 1960s, SF narratives like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek drove the national imagination of the US, fuelling the political will and public support for funding the Apollo programs. As SF-author Isaac Asimov observed, "Science Fiction writers and readers didn't put a man on the moon all by themselves, but they created a climate of opinion in which the goal of putting a man on the moon became acceptable" (Asimov, 1975, p. 20). It can be mentioned here that especially SF film has shaped our visual expectation of what is to come. Staying with Kubrick’s monumental work 2001: A Space Odyssey; the film has not only inspired subsequent generations of filmmakers but also established an idea of what the future would look like, as Janos Mark Szakolczai (2026) aptly addressed in his contribution to this blog post series. But in particular the minimalist use of colours and rounded shape design in the visual aesthetic of Kubrick's fictional spacecraft Discovery One, designed by Harry Lange and Tony Masters, has created an iconic prototype for futuristic designs in the Western-influenced imagination that is also echoed in today’s future robots (see for example Neuralink’s AI surgeon (Card79, 2022)):

“Every modern SF film that we see, from Star Wars to The Martian, draws inspiration about what the future should look like from 2001. Yet this incredible, important film went into pre-production nearly half a century ago. What a strange thought. It’s as if the real world is still trying to catch up with what Kubrick showed us.” (Brownlee & Bizony, 2015)

This film also shaped the imaginaries of AI development, as Vasilis Galanos points out in his dissertation (Galanos, 2023). In a 1968 press release for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of AI research, predicted that in 30 years we should have machines whose intelligence is comparable to man’s. It was the film’s AI character HAL 9000 that subsequently became one of the most influential representations of artificial intelligence in popular culture, shaping public understandings of AI far beyond its actual technical capabilities.

Further, SF inspired the engineers of the 20^th century, like Motorola chief developer Martin Cooper, who referred to the communicator from Star Trek with the words: “That was not a fantasy to us, although to the rest of the world it was. But to me that was an objective” (Cooper quoted in Jones, 2005, 00:13:30). Twenty years later, John Walker, CEO of the software company Autodesk, showed how SF neologisms find their way into the realm of tech development. He used the term Cyberspace, from William Gibson’s famous novel Neuromancer (Gibson, 1984), to formulate his vision of three-dimensional virtual reality image software: “I will use 'cyberspace' here to avoid burdening the discourse with still another term” (Walker, 1989).

The brilliant engineer, finding inspiration in art, has since been known as the Science-Fiction-feedback loop, referring to how “sci-fi inspiring real tech inspiring sci-fi inspiring real tech” (Bankston, 2019) and similar spill-over effects from SF to actual tech-development have created the perception “that futures envisioned by yesterday’s SF seem destined to become our futures” (Vint, 2020, p. 173). SF of the 20^th century prepared the breeding ground for what had to come.

As of today, in the 21^st century, things have changed. Engineers have turned into entrepreneurs and public R&D has been privatized. Confronted with a highly saturated attention economy, entrepreneurs have to stand out to gain funding. This is done by creating hypes (Galanos et al., 2026). In this dynamic, SF has moved from a mere inspiration to a strategic resource in the promotion of innovation, as can be seen with current tech-entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley.

One example is the privatization of the space-related R&D industry in the US. The so-called New-Space movement turns the once commonly shared dream of the final frontier into a private business. Among the forerunners is SpaceX, the company of tech-fascist Elon Musk. Musk is promoting the idea of colonizing Mars, a trajectory envisioned for generations in SF, while the actual business model of the company is to generate revenue through government contracts and satellite transportation. Here, the purpose of using SF is not to inspire innovation but to harvest already established expectations, as it allows one to connect technologies or entrepreneurial purpose to learned images of the future.

This dynamic can be observed on different occasions: During the presentation of ChatGPT, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tweeted the word “her” (Altman, 2024), turning a highly advanced statistical word processing auto-complete system into the personal AI assistant from the SF film of the same name: Her (Jonze, 2013). In reality, however, LLMs constantly create false results, are based on copyright infringements and turn out to become a hazardous risk for the environment. When Mark Zuckerberg renames his company to Meta and calls for the Metaverse, he deliberately invokes the echoes of the SF-novel Snow Crash (Stephenson, 1992) to create an aura of futurity. After promoting this idea, the company recently ended the program with a loss of over 70 billion dollars. And at a presentation of his neurotech company Neuralink, Elon Musk introduced his technology by saying that the device would allow you to “download [your memories] into a new body or into a robot body” (Musk, 2020), resembling ideas from the film The Matrix (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999) or the TV series and novel Altered Carbon (Morgan, 2001). Despite these shared expectations, the neuroscientific community is very clear that any attempt to upload the mind is impossible and that those claims are not only false but also dangerous and unethical (Linnarson quoted in BBC, 2018).

All these examples showcase a move performed by leading tech entrepreneurs. By aligning their companies and personas with canonical SF visions, they transform a collectively-held imaginary into a marketable asset. This rhetorical figure is what I call the Commodification of Science Fiction Imaginaries: The deployment of SF narratives to generate hype by promising to manifest the learned expectations for the future. As new technologies are often uncertain, difficult to explain and sometimes years away from fulfilling their most ambitious promises, SF provides powerful resources, offering learned concepts which novel technologies can be framed with. This rhetoric is designed to render innovations more conceivable, more intelligible and crucially more imaginable, thereby making them appear investable and fundable, while hiding the actual technology behind learned expectations, normalized and stabilized through SF. Ultimately, it is about the hermeneutic interpretation of the meaning that is attributed to emerging technologies (Mehnert & Grunwald, 2024).

One essential part of the commodification of imaginaries is also to blur the view on the actual development and create hidden agendas. This can be observed in the examples above but has also been discussed in the development of AI early on. In his book on Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village (Barbrook, 2007) the sociologist of technology Richard Barbrook examines how imaginaries of AI have overshadowed the actual development of the technology with through desirable but rather unrelated metaphors. Starting in the 1950s, computers were envisioned with the promise of becoming sentient machines, while, according to him, their actual use was primarily to produce and control cybernetic weapon systems. The assumption was that once the technology matured enough, self-conscious machines would be inevitable and that Artificial Consciousness (AC) would be achieved within the next decade (19). This imaginary was taken up by IBM, which announced in 1961 that it gave top priority to the development of AC, while IBM's computer machines continued to be used mainly as weapons systems. According to Barbrook, the imaginary and hope of AC legitimized the continuous research for smarter weapons, which would have otherwise not been funded and publicly supported (40–41).

For policymakers regulating and understanding emerging technologies, this rhetoric of hyping technologies has raised the stakes. When a privately-held company appropriates a collectively-shared vision of the future as its roadmap, public deliberation about technological direction becomes difficult. The entrepreneur who owns the imaginary shapes the market expectations and the range of futures that seem possible to strive for. All too often, regulation arrives late and has to respond to a trajectory already set by the performed narrative. This is creating the challenge that aspects that do not fit into the established storyline become more complicated to communicate.

In today's hyped tech industry, entrepreneurs have learned to use SF as a tool for harvesting expectations and mobilizing support in constructing technological futures – partly also because of a vacuum of alternative tales of non-tech futures, the embedding of technologies beyond capitalist dynamics or a lack of commonly shared societal visions. Understanding these fictional technofutures therefore requires attention not only to technical systems and economic interests, but also to the fictional worlds through which societies learn to anticipate what might come next.

References:

Altman, S. (2024, May 13). Her [Tweet]. Twitter. https://x.com/sama/status/1790075827666796666

Asimov, I. (1975). Science Fiction, I love you. In J. Gunn (Ed.), Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction (3rd ed.). McFarland & Co Inc.

Bankston, K. (2019). The Sci-Fi Feedback Loop. Open Transcripts. http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/sci-fi-feedback-loop/

Barbrook, R. (2007). Imaginary futures: From thinking machines to the global village. Pluto.

BBC. (2018, April 4). Brain back-up firm Nectome loses link to MIT. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43642786

Brownlee, J., & Bizony, P. (2015, August 5). How “2001: A Space Odyssey” Changed Cinematic Design. Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/3049402/how-2001-a-space-odyssey-changed-cinematic-design

Card79. (2022). Neuralink Robot. Card79. https://card79.com/work/neuralink-robot

Galanos, V. (2023). Expectations and expertise in artificial intelligence: Specialist views and historical perspectives on conceptualisation, promise, and funding. https://hdl.handle.net/1842/40420

Galanos, V., Belsunces, A. G., Alvial-Palavicino, C., Bareis, J., Blackwell, B., Charette, M., Cheng, M. Y., Dorofeeva, O., Gloerich, I., Klingebiel, J., Lammar, D., Mehnert, W., Michalec, O., Milne, G., Ravn, L., Roßmann, M., Shanley, D., Shen, J., Soto-Sanfiel, M. T., Tsakalakis, T., Vidmar, M. (2026). Towards Mapping and Defining Critical Hype Studies: Multidisciplinary Insights and Future Directions. Hype Studies. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18764034

Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer (01 ed.). Gollancz.

Jones, J. (Director). (2005, November 13). How William Shatner Changed the World [Documentary, Sci-Fi]. Handel Productions,  Mentorn.

Jonze, S. (Director). (2014, March 27). Her [Drama, Romance, Sci-Fi]. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/

Mehnert, W., & Grunwald, A. (2024). Hermeneutic technology assessment. In A. Grunwald (Ed.), Handbook of Technology Assessment (pp. 281–290). Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.

Morgan, R. (2001). Altered Carbon (1. Edition). Gollancz.

Musk, E. (Director). (2020). Watch Elon Musk’s ENTIRE live Neuralink demonstration [Video recording]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOWFXqT5MZ4

Stephenson, N. (1992). Snow Crash (New Ed Edition). Bantam Books.

Szakolczai, J. M. (2026). Polar Hype (Part 1): Big Bad Smartphone. Hype Studies Blog. https://hypestudies.org/blog/polar-hype-part-1-big-bad-smartphone

Vint, S. (2020). After the Human Culture, Theory and Criticism in the 21st Century (1st ed.).

Wachowski, L., & Wachowski, L. (Directors). (1999, March 31). The Matrix [Action, Sci-Fi]. Warner Bros.,  Village Roadshow Pictures,  Groucho Film Partnership.

Walker, J. (1989). Through the Looking Glass. Autodesk. https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_69.html

Wenzel Mehnert is a futurologist focusing on the imaginaries of new and emerging technologies. He researches, writes and teaches experimental methods of futurology. In his work, Wenzel Mehnert focuses on the intersection between speculative fictions and the evaluation of new and emerging sciences and technologies (e.g. A.I., SynBio, Internet of Things, etc.). He worked as a researcher at the Berlin University of the Arts, co-founded the Berlin Ethics Lab at the Technical University of Berlin and currently lives in Vienna, where he works at the Austrian Institute of Technology and the ethics of new and emerging technologies.