Fictional technology
Fictional technology is proposed or described in many different contexts for many different reasons:
- Exploratory engineering seeks to identify if a prospective technology can be designed in detail, and simulated, even if it cannot be built yet - this is often a prerequisite to venture capital funding, or investigation in weapons research
- Pro-technology propaganda often emphasizes a speculative potential of a specific technology in order to stimulate investment in it, or a counter-technology. This is a common motivation in any society dominated by a military-industrial complex, such as the 19th century British Empire or 20th Century United States. See also militarism, technological escalation, arms race.
- Advertising which emphasizes some amazing potential of some technology that is "under development" (usually without any specific timelines) by a company that is seeking simply to present itself as being competent with technology. See also vaporware, persuasion technology.
- Science fiction which explores the social or political or personal impact of some technology through storytelling.
Many technologies are fictional for a long time before they become real. Examples are:
- hypertext, e.g. the World Wide Web
- rocket pack
- atomic bomb
- expert system
- genetic engineering
- radiological weapon
- robot (only economically feasible with rather drastic energy and material subsidy, or in extremely hazardous applications that probably no one should really be doing at all)
- death ray (easier to kill people in other ways)
- jet pack (while rocket packs are useful in space, jets are only useful in the atmosphere where there are better ways to get around than strapping this on your back)
- artificial intelligence (any intellectual task that can be reduced to instructions and the sensory data inputs provided is in theory automatable, but, the human effort to do so is almost always not worth the gains made - even the Turing Test is quite often passed in limited contexts)
