Science fiction is becoming reality
Jung started the seminar with discussion around future scoping and how people have speculated the future of advertising over the years. “The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed,” commences Jung.
The pace of change is fast and is rapidly getting faster. Jung elaborated on this with the point that while telephones developed over 75 years to reach 50 million people, Pokémon Go took only 19 days.
“If things are moving that fast, perhaps we can step back and see how science fiction and this image of the future has been portrayed in the past and see how the gap between science fiction and reality is narrowing too,” says Jung.
Jung went on to provide a series of examples of science fiction through the ages that largely point to what exists in the present. Jung started her timeline with HG Wells, “the father of science fiction”.
“HG Wells anticipated wars, the sexual revolution, motorised transport causing the growth of suburbs and this product Wikipedia he called ‘the world brain’. His vision in 1937 was of a permanent world encyclopaedia,” said Jung.
Quoting Wells, Jung said, “The whole human memory can be and probably in a short time will be made accessible to every individual. It need not be concentrated in any one single place, it need not be vulnerable as a human head or human heart is vulnerable, it can be reproduced exactly fully in Peru, China, Iceland, central Africa or wherever else. He also talked about a great number of workers that would be engaged and keep this human knowledge up-to-date. 64 years later, we have Wikipedia, so it’s amazing to think that he had imagined this,” says Jung.
Jung provided other examples of things happening in the present that may have once been believed to be science fiction, including: Google’s Magenta writing its first song, McCann Japan hiring its first artificial intelligence creative director and the release of Sayonara, which is the first movie to feature an android performing opposite a human actor.
As technology has developed over time, agencies and brands find themselves with more scope to collaborate with interesting groups of people, including scientists. To animate this point, Jung showed a remarkable campaign, called Air-Ink, created by Marcel Sydney who collaborated with MIT scientist, Anirudh Sharma of Graviky Labs. The campaign, created for Tiger Beer, aimed to reduce air pollution in Asia by turning pollution particles into ink. The ink was then used by artists and designers to express their creativity. Jung deemed the campaign as “a science fiction project in itself”. Find out more about the campaign here.
Jung concluded the seminar with the following key points:
• “Ideas have never been more important. Technology is never the idea.”
• “Now more than ever, people are in control and won’t engage unless things are interesting and compelling.”
• “We’re no longer bound to the old model of telling a great story and then finding ways to present that in a science fiction approach. Technology can instead help us to actually take part in the story instead of just telling it.”
