Toward Science Fiction Education

How AI has Transformed the Case for Imaginative Learning

[Cross posting with Science Fiction Talk]¹

Imagine you are given an assignment to write a science fiction short story that begins with a character waking up. You must take seriously the specifics involved. Does the story take place on Earth? If in the near future, will people still be waking up to a cell-phone alarm or favorite song? What about 200 years from now. What technologies might be standard? Will bubbles emerge from a mattress (will we be sleeping on mattresses?) and lift us to an upright position? Will there be coffee?

The assignment does not require you to be Earthbound. Perhaps you’re on a spaceship or another planet. What is “morning” then? Will there be another term? What is a “day” in deep space?

The assignment does not require that you wake up alone. Is sleep domestic or collective? The future might offer a variety of social scenarios. Imagine floating in zero G and at the proper time being lowered to a platform…

She twitched involuntarily as her feet touched the floor, the magnets clicked, and her eyes shot open. She took a few breaths of scented air and looked up to see her son drifting down. His calmness still surprised her—the insertion in utero of avian DNA enabled his cohort to sleep erect naturally, essential to space management as a thousand people made the three-year flight to Jupiter’s moon, Io. As the light rose and the scent cloud dissipated, she saw dozens of children dropping like rain to the education pods below.

Waking up 200 years from now might be unlike anything any of us have thought of yet. Or you could wake up in a cabin deep in the New Hampshire woods, because you are opting out of the world the AI made. Great. But you need to describe everything about the world that made you make this decision.

For many students, a science fiction education built on the daily practice of imaginative writing may offer a more valuable education than going to college. Putting aside the danger of another Victor Frankenstein, radical imagining can produce infinite aspirational, radical, and practical ideas. Those who imagine daily life in the future, in writing, will feel more in charge of it, because the writing demands it. To describe something not yet invented requires attention to detail and craft. You activate engineering thinking.

Consider the scrupulousness required to describe a phenomenon like waking up in zero gravity in an unfamiliar environment. Anyone who focuses their mind on a task like this is already thinking beyond anything taught in the first year of college.

Friends and acquaintances in the sci fi community will be surprised by my new view. I’ve spent the last 5-7 years thinking about how to bring more science fiction and future studies into the university curriculum. As a dean I used to talk about endowing chairs in science fiction writing. I knew the work of all my faculty who were writing and teaching science fiction. I was the founder of large online science fiction club (nearly 50,000 members during the Covid lockdown) that hosted conversations with Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson, David Brin, PW Singer, Joyce Carol Oates (who has some really fine sci fi), among others. I would talk nonstop about how this energy should be leveraged by higher ed infrastructure. Now I’m not sure universities are right for the task, let alone up to the task.

Why universities fail the future

Universities have two real purposes: conserving/transmitting what is already known and supporting the creation of new knowledge. It is obvious that conserving can be at odds with creating. A certain practicality prevails, where conservationists understand their job is to transmit what is known in order to get to the frontier of knowledge and identify where to launch into the unknown. It’s a constraining setup, any way you look at it. Universities reward students for demonstrating mastery of existing knowledge while claiming to foster innovation. The consequence? Intellectual timidity about the new. Students are trained to reference what has already been thought rather than imagine what has never been conceived.

Radical imagination needs to be free of conservation. Science fiction education bypasses the preservation constraint by encouraging original world-building from the start.

What changed my thinking? AI. Within two years of the rollout of ChatGPT, powerful large language models (LLMs) have opened up worlds for the imagination by making vast amounts of knowledge instantly accessible. Good science fiction has to be at least partly based in reality. Writers can now use a pro-model LLM to check the physics of their future world, or the geology, the biology, the engineering, the atmospherics. AI can advise on whether a scenario is possible or under what conditions it could be possible. AI can offer a vocabulary for metals, alloys, microbes, transporters, simply by asking. Students can now check the plausibility of their wildest ideas without years of coursework. Let the envisioning begin.

Many young people would be better served by envisioning first and letting their imagination spur an interest in learning, than be daunted by the vast mountain of what is already known. I wonder what tiny fraction of students have ever been asked to describe a new invention or idea they’ve thought of or to persuade anyone an idea is possible.

Good science fiction is a matter of describing worlds in which humans, with all of our irrational quirks, live and engage with new technologies. Science fiction assumes technological change. Science fiction involves thinking about how humans make change, adapt to change, master change. Science fiction thinking is not imagining an app that allows us to talk to birds and animals or a Star Trek-type replicator that 3D-prints your food. Science fiction is thinking through how people will wake up living with the technology, about how their days will change. It is in thinking through the minutiae of daily life, community life, that brilliant new ideas are born.

World-building requires systems thinking. Character development demands psychological insight. Technological speculation necessitates interdisciplinary synthesis. These skills translate directly to strategic planning, product development, and organizational leadership. Firms value employees who can envision multiple futures and adapt to rapid change. Companies desperately need employees who can anticipate how emerging technologies will affect human behavior, social structures, and market dynamics. There will clearly be demand for graduates with these skills.

Canonical science fiction involves so much weaponry fighting alien unknowns in part because military tech is easier to imagine than mundane domestic tech. But the market for innovation in daily life is far larger. The commercial transport ships in the series The Expanse feature seat belts, for example. Surely the future has imagined better technology than that. This would make a great sci fi writing exercise. This is exactly the kind of granular, real-world problem that AI is poised to help us solve, acting as a creative partner in building more plausible futures.

I am not sure where, how, or under what institutional umbrella a science fiction education should happen. Perhaps a year-long program to support students before college. What I know now is that our education system teaches students to avoid being wrong and produces risk-averse thinking. A science fiction education teaches students to be boldly wrong in interesting ways, then refine their ideas through iteration. Intellectual fearlessness is infinitely valuable. Building a program will take intellectual courage.

I’m starting the conversation here because my science fiction club experience made clear that sci fi seems naturally to create networks of forward-thinking individuals (like SSGL). These communities are already powerful forces for innovation and social change, connecting people across traditional academic and professional boundaries.

Waking up to the future

Let’s return to our waking up scene: everyone is now alert. What is their day like, assuming there is such a thing as a “day?” Are there schedules in the future? Certain tasks to do or places to be at certain times? Perhaps tasks are seasonally driven, as they were for a medieval farmer or a stone-age fisherman. Or they’re production schedule driven. Or battle driven. Or off to whatever “school” looks like 200 years from now, if there aren’t knowledge chips planted in brains.

How do you describe a daily schedule? How will the schedule be communicated in the distant future? Perhaps the character will be programmed during the night and will wake “knowing.” Will skin or hair become elements of information delivery systems? One idea sparks the next, endlessly.

Our current educational system prepares the next generation for a world that already exists. Science fiction education prepares students for worlds that do not yet exist, but might soon. The future belongs to those who can imagine it first, then build the skills necessary to create it.

1. Thank you to Alder Riley and the SSGL community for this inspiration.