I’ve noticed lately that depictions of future technology in science fiction look more ‘current’ that ‘future’. It feels like there are fewer new ideas, as if everything that could ever be imagined has already been imagined. Somehow, when we picture the next generation of a form of technology, it often comes out closely resembling its contemporary design. This narrowing and anchoring of our collective imaginations is what I call Recursive Futurism. Its effect is a ‘creative loop’, an Ouroboros of the imagination. It’s not impossible to escape its influence, but it’s becoming rarer and more difficult.
I recently tried watching The Expanse (yet again), but I’m struggling to get into it. You see, to me, the show doesn’t feel like it’s happening 300 hundred years in the future. Before I read when it’s set, I would have guessed maybe fifty years from now—a hundred at most. The Expanse is an amazing show that presents, realistically, the physics of living and travelling in space, and its gritty depiction evokes the likes of Alien and Blade Runner, giving the world a lived-in feeling. But a few details break the illusion for me.
For instance, in one of the earliest scenes of the first episode, we see a contemporary drone flying above a crowd. But wouldn’t drone technology evolve over the next 300 years? Then in the scene where detective Miller sees an image of the missing Julie Mao, he does so on a device that closely resembles a modern cellphone—albeit with small holographic projectors and a transparent screen.
Transparent cellphone (with crack) from The Expanse
Now, I want you to imagine a device people will use to communicate, consume media, and share ideas in 300 years. Did you also imagine something like a current cellphone: a rectangle, that maybe folds, maybe is also transparent? You wouldn’t be alone. “So what?” you might say. “We’re not going to abandon the cellphone, are we?” Well I think we will—at least in its current form. Think back 300 years: how much of that technology persists in its (almost) original form today? Not much. So why would the cellphone remain largely unchanged for the next few hundreds years when it’s changed so much in just the last thirty?
Star Trek
Before The Expanse, there was another show that really felt like it was set 300 years in our future: Star Trek: The Original Series. It too featured a wireless communication device, but this communicator wasn’t just an inventive spin on the rotary telephone—it was a leap of the imagination that brought us a compact, wireless device that could communicate over vast distances. In fact, we have that very communicator to thank for the invention of the cellphone. This is an example of what I think science fiction does at its best — inspire inventive minds to realise the imaginings of creative minds.
Another example of this phenomenon is the game The Callisto Protocol, coincidentally also set 300 years in the future. When upgrading your weapon, the machine that adds new parts is something between a 3D printer and a replicator from Star Trek (that show is original ‘the Simpsons already did it‘). Again, the same story plays out: we start with a ‘magical’ futuristic device that inspires the invention of a contemporary one—in this case the 3D printer. But now that we have it, further depictions of replicator-like devices can’t help but be realised through the lens of the 3D printer. This is recursive futurism at play and demonstrates its effect on curbing the imagination. The more ‘futuristic’ technology we get in our time, the more it seems to hinder our ability to untether our imaginations and conjure the next iteration that future generations of scientists and engineers will create. But it’s not impossible.
Now I’m sure there were many reasons why the creators of The Callisto Protocol and The Expanse chose to depict their respective technologies in these ways. For one, they were probably more concerned with the gameplay or viewing experience, rather than pioneering new technology. In The Expanse‘s case it serves to demonstrate Miller’s financial situation: owning a cracked phone means he’s subsisting on his meagre salary and not ‘on the take’. However, I think there are other ways the same information could have been conveyed, while at the same time employing more creativity. This is certainly not a failing on the part of either, but an example of how recursive futurism invades our thinking at such a fundamental level. If you’ve ever watched any sci-fi shows from the sixties, you might recall that many props were wrapped in silver foil to make them look ‘futuristic’. People even wore silver suits. Of course this doesn’t mean that the shows’ creators thought everything would be wrapped in silver in the future. Maybe it started out as a cheap way of decorating those props, but it later became a shorthand for ‘futuristic’. An equivalent shorthand is at play in both the game and the show—yet it is also a shortcut, allowing them to not have to think too hard about what these technologies will look like in a few hundred years. It’s a modern day equivalent of the Enterprise dropping a cable to the planet’s surface attached to a foil-covered rotary telephone.
I hope these examples demonstrate just what I mean by recursive futurism. First we get a rendition of a piece of incredible technology (the communicator). That technology is then realised (as a cellphone) but, by its mere existence in our collective zeitgeist, ti seems to hamstring further renditions of the same or similar technology, and we resort to that generations silver foil. I’m not saying it happens all the time; there are many great writers who are imagining a future just as amazingly advanced as Star Trek did nearly sixty years ago. In fact, Star Trek: The Next Generation did it by shrinking the hand-held communicator down to a badge. But, when it doesn’t happen, when you get a largely-unchanged piece of technology after 300 years, well now there’s a name for the phenomenon.
The influence of a show like Star Trek on society cannot be understated, but will most likely never be repeated. Times have changed—the world’s population is now nearly three times what it was in the 1960s, and the explosion of ‘content’ means that, even if a show with as much imagination were to appear now, it would have to compete with all the other media in circulation. But we need those visionaries now more than ever precisely because it’s more difficult today than it was then. They will inspire the next generation of scientists and inventors. Actively resisting the effects of recursive futurism has the potential to create new technologies and industries. Since its introduction in 2007, the iPhone has become thinner, gained more pixels, and more features, but it hasn’t changed in a way as fundamental as when it first appeared. This is understandable because launching radical new products is expensive and companies can’t afford to make mistakes. Imagination, on the other hand, has an infinite budget and a much faster R&D time. What I wish the creators of games like The Callisto Protocol, or shows like The Expanse, would do is put aside the technology we have now and free their imaginations to conceive of something wholly new, that resembles neither the future projection nor the present realisation. This is the place where real innovation happens. There just isn’t enough media today portraying these kinds of futures.
We must maintain an awareness of the effects of recursive futurism if we to resist its influence and pioneer tomorrow’s technologies. I hope I have been able to open your mind to this phenomenon and help you identify when it’s happening. And if you’re in the business of imagining the future, I want you to be aware of this pitfall and work that little bit harder when portraying future technologies. This is a rallying cry against the constriction of our collective imaginations—we need more people imagining the possible impossible. To misquote Dylan Thomas: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light bulbs above our heads.“