I have argued for years that science fiction is one of the best scenario-planning tools we have. After reading a fascinating article in The Atlantic, I would add one important qualification: you have to read science fiction properly. The article argues that some of Silicon Valley’s most influential entrepreneurs have treated science fiction less as a warning, satire, or social commentary and more as technical documentation. Ideas about robots, AI, space colonies, and technologically managed societies became things to build. That is where science fiction becomes dangerous.
The wrong lesson
Isaac Asimov did not write about robots because killer robots were cool. His laws of robotics were a way of exploring how complicated the relationship between humans and intelligent machines could become. 2001: A Space Odyssey was not an advertisement for HAL. Star Trek was not primarily a proposal for building spaceships. Yet parts of Silicon Valley appear to have extracted the technology from these stories while leaving the warning behind. The dystopia becomes a product roadmap. That is exactly how not to use science fiction.
Stop asking whether it will happen
In Stop Predicting, one of my 13 lessons from 1,400 attempts to see what was coming is that science fiction is one of the best scenario-planning tools we have. But the point was never prediction.
- When I tell leadership teams to watch Blade Runner, I am not suggesting replicants are coming. The interesting question is underneath the robots: what does it mean to be human when machines become increasingly indistinguishable from us?
- Watch The Matrix and ask what happens when the system you operate inside prevents you from seeing reality. That might describe your technology architecture, organisational structure, business model, or culture.
- Watch 2001 and ask what happens when the tool we created starts managing us. In the age of agentic AI, that question suddenly feels considerably less fictional.
Science fiction is valuable because it takes an assumption and pushes it until something breaks.
The strategic imagination deficit
Most corporate scenario planning does the opposite. It starts with today’s world and moves everything slightly to the left or right. Growth is 3% instead of 5%. Regulation increases. AI adoption accelerates. Energy costs rise. Perfectly sensible. Often strategically useless. Science fiction does not ask permission from the present. It can remove money, eliminate jobs, create machine customers, make biology programmable, give algorithms authority, extend life dramatically, or make today’s dominant business model economically absurd. You do not have to believe any of those futures will happen. That misses the point. The better question is: if this world existed, what would it reveal about the assumptions we are making today? That is scenario planning.
Technology is not inevitable
One of the most useful ideas in The Atlantic piece is the rejection of technological inevitability. Technology does not arrive independently of human choices. We fund it, design it, regulate it, deploy it, reject it, and normalise it. There is nothing inevitable about the future. That is another reason I called my book Stop Predicting. The objective of foresight is not to identify the science-fiction future that is going to happen and start building it faster than everybody else. It is to develop enough imagination to recognise multiple possible futures before you become trapped inside one.
Build a science-fiction idea bank
I recommend that leadership teams build a science-fiction idea bank. Every time you encounter a film, novel, game, or imagined world that makes you think, “That is ridiculous, but…”, capture it. Then interrogate it. What assumption has disappeared? Who gains power? Who loses it? What becomes abundant? What becomes scarce? What happens to the customer, the business model, and human agency? And most importantly: is this a future we actually want? That may be the question Silicon Valley occasionally forgot. Science fiction should not give us assembly instructions for the future. It should make us uncomfortable enough to think harder about the one we are building.
