Coordination Density: Science Fiction and the future we risk never building

Disclaimer: This reflects my own perspective. This is me thinking out loud. It does not represent the views of my employer or any other organisation.

 

Ray Bradbury is claimed to have said that Science Fiction is about the ideas that haven't happened yet, but soon will. Bradbury was well known to be prophetic about the role of science fiction as an incubator of civilizations that are yet to be. And I believe it to be true.

Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world, because it's the history of ideas, the history of our civilization birthing itself. Science fiction is central to everything we've ever done, and people who make fun of science fiction writers don't know what they're talking about – Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's observation is not unique. His contemporary Robert Heinlein, perhaps one of the greatest science fiction writers, defined the genre as 'a realistic speculation about possible future events', meaning what is fiction today, soon becomes fact.

The prophetic nature of science fiction has long been observed. Modern futurology credits it as important source material for understanding the future. Perhaps most tellingly, the very first issue of Amazing Stories, the magazine that popularised the genre carried the slogan: 'Extravagant Fiction Today. Cold Fact Tomorrow'.

Science fiction helps us imagine things that might be, both the good and the bad. Human beings are meaning makers, and the evocative power of science fiction helps us make sense of the future. And in doing so, it helps make it come to life. Science fiction doesn't just predict the future; it manufactures it. By creating shared mental models, it gives everyone who encounters it, engineers, investors, policymakers, culture makers, a common language and a common horizon to build toward.

But the modern world we live in today, many of its iconic inventions which were birthed through the efforts of a great science fiction corpus of the past century is now at risk of not being able to produce the same for our future. If 21st century's greatest boon is the digital revolution, the fragmentation of attention that it creates is its greatest bane. I argue here that science fiction's effectiveness as a coordination mechanism is being diluted by this fragmentation. What do I mean by fragmentation? For most of the 20th century, people consumed media in broadly shared ways. The same television programmes, the same blockbuster films, the same bestselling novels. Not everyone, and not equally. But enough people were drawing from the same cultural well that shared archetypes could form and spread. The internet was supposed to democratise that further. Instead, algorithmic feeds, streaming personalisation and the attention economy have done the opposite. They have sorted us into self-selecting bubbles, each optimised for engagement rather than shared experience. We have more content than ever and fewer shared moments than ever.

The consequences are not just the lack of shared cultural moments, but in the stagnation of innovation. And reversing that will take a civilisational effort.

Science fiction historically worked as a bridge between imagination and engineering. Not because it predicted technologies, but because it turned emerging possibilities into shared archetypes that large groups of people could collectively orient around. When that shared orientation weakens, certain kinds of civilisational innovation become harder to pursue.

 

Origins

The origins of science fiction are hard to pin down. Stories from antiquity blended facts and mythology can be considered as part of this genre. But the modern version of the genre took shape post-enlightenment, as a way to imagine, visualise and comment on the anxieties of the day. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in the 1800s are considered its pioneering works.

Science fiction started as another kind of story, one that allows the reader to extrapolate and imagine things. Like all stories, science fiction stories had to be engaging and evoke a sense of excitement, but they had to have some anchor in everyday reality. And that is just what happened. Jules Verne did not invent the submarine from the depths of his imagination alone. He borrowed from what was already being experimented in naval circles. In the early 1800s, Robert Fulton had built an underwater vessel for Napoleon — incidentally also named Nautilus. During the American Civil War, underwater vessels were deployed to break naval blockades choking the South. The CSS Hunley was one such working submarine, forward deployed in combat.

Verne's Nautilus from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea did however inspire the future of the submarine. Simon Lake, the designer of the Argonaut, had read Verne's book as a boy and developed an almost obsessive interest in it. It helped him build the first successful submersible in 1897. But Verne didn't only borrow from existing naval experiments. He imagined a fully sustainable self-powered electric submarine — a technology barely at the edges of possibility in his time. That was a true leap of fiction. It became the blueprint for the nuclear-powered submarine of the 20th century.

Mass media in the 20th century allowed people to share imaginative ideas in ways that were not possible before. Riding on the explosion of novels, magazines, television and motion pictures, science fiction became more than a niche form of literature. Asimov, Star Trek, Dune, E.T., Ursula K. Le Guin were not just authors or stories. They became civilisational reference points.

What was elite imagination became mass culture. In a century marked by two World Wars, the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, and extraordinary post-war prosperity, science fiction and its many sub-genres bloomed. The collective imagination it sparked didn't just inspire people. It provided the mental prototypes that fed back into what got built and what got funded.

Arthur C Clarke's 1945 paper 'Extra-terrestrial Relays' was the prototype that inspired satellites and the later boom in telecommunications. Robert Heinlein's space exploration stories deeply inspired many NASA administrators who orchestrated the lunar missions. In 1976, the space shuttle naming programme received so many fan letters requesting the vessel be named Enterprise after the Star Trek ship that NASA named their first orbital test vehicle after it. The Star Trek communicator inspired scientists at Motorola when they were creating the first mobile device. Computer scientists at Xerox PARC were influenced by Stewart Brand's counter-cultural Whole Earth Catalogue when the graphical user interface was born. William Gibson's Neuromancer imagined what cyberspace could be, and the early ARPANET researchers had a common language to work towards.

I would also argue that the current boom in agentic AI, systems that string multiple tasks together and work for you just by talking to them, was inspired by a generation of Gen X and Millennial computer scientists who grew up watching Iron Man interact with Jarvis. The list is endless.

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the twentieth century – J.G. Ballard

In the second half of the 20th century, science fiction shifted from predicting gadgets to being a coordinating mechanism A shared cultural blueprint that aligned governments, engineers, and the public toward collective technological goals.

Why did this happen? Beyond its mass appeal, science fiction taps into fundamental human emotions. It provides hope of things that could be and cautions against the dangers of what could come. On both counts it seeds ambition in those who consume it. The metaphors it creates expand our imagination and give us collective vocabulary to share, discuss and act on. It provides shared mental models to iterate towards.

But this incredible engine of coordination is now under threat, by the very thing it has birthed.

 

The Shift

Science fiction's journey from fringe imagination to innovation vocabulary in the 20th century is now well documented. But the same engine of growth is seemingly not firing on all cylinders anymore. Neal Stephenson wrote in 2011 about an Innovation Starvation, arguing that the lack of positive visions of the future was stalling scientific progress. The 20th century gave us electricity, automobiles, human flight, nuclear energy, manned space exploration and the internet. Then it seems to have stalled. We are still dependent mainly on fossil fuels. And the 21st century seems more polarised and more unequal than the one before it.

There is more safety, but less exploration of frontiers. The vast democratisation of information has created a glut of content but not a renaissance of exploration. The human hard work and collective endeavour that created the Moon landings and the Manhattan Project has given way to automating our emails and generating synthetic content. The AI boom, rather than reversing the stagnation, seems to be concentrating the means of production further away from human agency. There are outliers. A few techno-elites talk about making us interplanetary. But more people are sceptical than truly enthused.

The SpaceX IPO may generate irrational exuberance, but many are in it for a quick return rather than the civilisational impact. And yet it would be wrong to declare the coordination effect dead entirely. If the IPO goes as the early signals suggest, it would still represent a genuine mass coordination event around a civilisational bet. But one SpaceX is not enough. We need many such things happening simultaneously across many domains.

But there is a deeper issue at play. Two conditions mutually reinforce each other when science fiction successfully manufactures the future. The first is cultural coordination, the ability to inspire collective mental imagination and shared archetypes. The second is technical proximity, where an imaginative leap is within reach of current engineering and not just in the imagination layer.

In the 20th century these conditions were independently true. Science fiction narratives had enough coordination power that enough people understood the ideas, enough institutions recognised the potential, enough capital saw the value and enough makers could imagine pathways towards it. When Arthur C Clarke wrote about extraterrestrial relays, he wasn't inventing satellites. He did not invent the rocket or radio waves. He calculated how to place existing German V-2 rocket technology at a specific orbital altitude. Because it relied on existing engineering, it wasn't viewed as magic. Decades later when the COMSAT program was formed, engineers used his specific calculations as a literal deployment guide. If he had suggested teleporting data via psychic waves, no engineering team could have coordinated around it.

I call this socially legible technical proximity.

Under these conditions the Star Trek communicator could become reality. Telephones existed. Satellites already transmitted data. Millions of people were inspired by Captain Kirk speaking with his ship from a device that fit in his pocket. The archetype of a handheld wireless communicator was culturally well-understood. More importantly, it sat right at the edge of existing 1970s cellular radio engineering.

By contrast, the space elevator in Frank Herbert's Dune has not become reality. Not because there was no aspiration or collective imagination around it, but because there were no material science prototypes that could construct at a planetary scale. No small scale prototype means no engineering on-ramp. Though it is worth noting that Obayashi, a Japanese construction giant, has been quietly working since 2012 on plans for exactly that, targeting 2050, using carbon nanotube cables stretching 96,000 kilometres into space. More power to them. But their own feasibility studies say it will require international cooperation to become real. And international cooperation is exactly the kind of coordination that a fragmented world is finding hardest to summon.

But something people miss is that technical proximity and cultural coordination are not independent of each other. Technical proximity is actually downstream of the coordination effects of science fiction. Culture coordinates imagination first. That coordinated imagination creates the mental archetypes. This is what gives engineers the technical prototypes to extrapolate from. Break the cultural coordination, and you starve the technical proximity development as well.

Today the fragmentation of the mind is attacking the cultural coordination layer. Thanks to the addictive doom loops of digital technology, what was supposed to be democratisation of information has become siloed bubbles. There are fewer and fewer pan-cultural moments, and hence no shared archetype. Fragmentation is weakening the very mechanism that creates the archetypes that technical proximity depends on. As shared cultural consumption declines, fewer futures achieve the narrative density needed to become coordinated technical projects. The result is not merely fewer shared stories. It is fewer socially legible engineering trajectories.

 

The Edge

This brings us to the problem of the future. The role of science fiction as a collective future rehearsal is now unmistakably under threat. Fragmentation does not merely reduce shared culture. It changes which futures are actually possible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic – Arthur C. Clarke

We are potentially at a stage where if we do not solve the fragmentation problem, sufficiently advanced technology will simply remain magic. In the realm of fantasy rather than something engineering can prototype and make real.

The AI boom tells you something about where coordination has already broken down. Yes, civilisational bets are being made in gene research, drug discovery, climate modelling. But they are getting buried under the noise of every company rushing to reduce their human workforce and make agents talk to agents. The capital is flowing toward automating emails, optimising ads, generating synthetic content. As Peter Thiel once noted, 'we wanted flying cars and got 140 characters'. Today’s version might be ‘we wanted to cure cancer and got a better chatbot.’

Yes, most will argue it is still early and the civilisational bets will come. But the pattern so far is unmistakable. Highly effective at local optimisation and short-cycle returns. Much less capable of generating the kind of shared ambition that put people on the moon or sequenced the human genome.

Some technologies can't be built in a niche. Nuclear energy, space exploration, climate engineering need mass legitimacy, political will, public imagination, and collective ambition held together over decades. They are not products of optimisation loops. They come from societies that can imagine the same future at scale and hold that image long enough to build toward it.

Civilizational scale innovation requires shared imagination.

The cultural coordination loop is also becoming one-directional. Previously elite imagination seeded mass culture and mass culture co-opted and fed back into what got built. Now elite imagination stays within elite bubbles. The techno-elite have the capital to make parts of it real. But when that reality reaches the masses, it arrives fully formed. The masses inherit it. They never got to shape it. And that is a problem.

The imagination loop is closing in on itself. And when only a few people dream the future, the rest of us inherit it.

 

So what

A few things to consider:

First, the fragmentation problem is what designers call a wicked problem. It needs the best minds focused on it, and it needs to be solved not through centrally planned mandates but through organic pan-cultural moments that allow science fiction to reclaim its role as a coordination mechanism.

Second, we need to move away from short-termism and regain our confidence to make civilizational bets, celebrate them loudly, and not let them get buried under quarterly returns.

Third, AI should not be about capturing value for the elite. It should be about empowering humanity. It should live up to the comparison that has been evoked of it being like electricity, one that allows humans to remain the builders and not just the prompters.

 

William Gibson famously observed that

'The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.'

Fragmentation threatens to make it something more troubling. A future that is not delayed, but simply not built.

 

Origins & Edges is an essay series written as thinking-in-public. Tracing where ideas come from, where they are going and what they might mean next. Across marketing, culture, tech and the craft of designing the self.

 

References

• Ray Bradbury on science fiction as “the fiction of ideas”
• Robert A. Heinlein, “Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults and Virtues”
• Amazing Stories, Volume 1, Number 1, April 1926
• Britannica, “Did Jules Verne Invent the Submarine?”
• USS Nautilus Museum, “Simon Lake and the Submarine Contest of 1893”
• ITU News, “Arthur C. Clarke”
• Wired, “May 25, 1945: Sci-Fi Author Predicts Future by Inventing It”
• Time, “Martin Cooper”
• Popular Science, “How Star Trek fans changed the name of NASA’s first space shuttle”
• NASA Johnson Space Center Oral Histories Project
• Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, University of Chicago Press excerpt
• InCyber, “Neuromancer: a deep dive into the source of cyberpunk culture”
• Neal Stephenson, “Innovation Starvation,” Wired
• Obayashi Corporation, “The Space Elevator Construction Concept”
• Global Construction Review, “Construction firm plans to build space elevator by 2050”
• Axios, “Silicon Valley fixated on sci fi”
• Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, reference overview
• William Gibson quote attribution note, Wikiquote

Note: All images were imagined and created with help of Claude (for image prompts), ChatGPT and Gemini.