It is obviously impossible to claim that there is no influence, but I don't think technological development is particularly guided by fiction. In part because succesful technology is much more visible than unsuccesful technology and succesful technology must be both possible. So feasability or possibility is a very strong guide.
I suspect fiction is very good at supplying vocabulary for naming technology once it is instantiated, but on the whole the ideas come from almost entirely different directions to the fictional ideas (and thus it is unrealistic to claim the fictional idea as a precedent.)
A couple of 'near misses' I can think of are mobile phones and 3D virtual environments.
Mobile phones have similar functions to Star Trek communicators, but I seriously doubt Star Trek had much to do with the development of mobile phones. Instead technology made it possible to take baby steps that ended up with a teeny , robust, voice communication system. (Which still is nothing like a communicator if you look at it critically.)
The various fictional virutal environments (such as Neuromancer or Snow Crash) have yet to eventuate, and when they do are much more likely to come out of Ultima than some serious business drive. (Why? In part because they are actually really dumb interfaces, bringing across all the disadvantages of the physical world to the virual world. Yay!)
On the other hand when real developments eventually come along that have similar properties to fictional ideas it is really handy to steal terminology. Mostly because the words actually mean something as opposed to the newly invented word 'frozbidget' which is not obviously to do with- say- a virtual representation of yourself in an immersive 3-dimensional enviroment.
The other reason I don't think fiction is a strong guide is that Ideas are Cheap and Doing Stuff is Hard. In University we come to value Ideas, but once you hit the real world it turns out that there are lots more ideas than there is capability to do them. And most ideas are not really goers. In fact ideas in isolation don't really work- they need a supporting caste of thousands (of ideas) before they can even be called a technology.
And while a fiction author can easily gloss over the intermediate steps of how the idea became succesful, we can't in the real world. In practice the means often define the ends.
Finally there is an error of observation that often makes it seem like fiction has influenced technology. In reality there are just so many damn ideas in fiction that anything that pops up in reality probably has some kind of precedent in fiction- even if it actualy had no influence on the real devleopment of the technology.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect fiction is very good at supplying vocabulary for naming technology once it is instantiated, but on the whole the ideas come from almost entirely different directions to the fictional ideas (and thus it is unrealistic to claim the fictional idea as a precedent.)
A couple of 'near misses' I can think of are mobile phones and 3D virtual environments.
Mobile phones have similar functions to Star Trek communicators, but I seriously doubt Star Trek had much to do with the development of mobile phones. Instead technology made it possible to take baby steps that ended up with a teeny , robust, voice communication system. (Which still is nothing like a communicator if you look at it critically.)
The various fictional virutal environments (such as Neuromancer or Snow Crash) have yet to eventuate, and when they do are much more likely to come out of Ultima than some serious business drive. (Why? In part because they are actually really dumb interfaces, bringing across all the disadvantages of the physical world to the virual world. Yay!)
On the other hand when real developments eventually come along that have similar properties to fictional ideas it is really handy to steal terminology. Mostly because the words actually mean something as opposed to the newly invented word 'frozbidget' which is not obviously to do with- say- a virtual representation of yourself in an immersive 3-dimensional enviroment.
The other reason I don't think fiction is a strong guide is that Ideas are Cheap and Doing Stuff is Hard. In University we come to value Ideas, but once you hit the real world it turns out that there are lots more ideas than there is capability to do them. And most ideas are not really goers. In fact ideas in isolation don't really work- they need a supporting caste of thousands (of ideas) before they can even be called a technology.
And while a fiction author can easily gloss over the intermediate steps of how the idea became succesful, we can't in the real world. In practice the means often define the ends.
Finally there is an error of observation that often makes it seem like fiction has influenced technology. In reality there are just so many damn ideas in fiction that anything that pops up in reality probably has some kind of precedent in fiction- even if it actualy had no influence on the real devleopment of the technology.