This is a riff on Ellen Griffen's note on Substack, Why do people keep saying that novelists “predicted” the future? and my response. The gist of it is an attempt to plot (as a multidimensional, interactive plot!) the talents you need to come up with an idea, convince some people that it's interesting and practical for daily life, and then to see it built and actually deployed (often in grotesquely warped form).

the idea

key challenges:

• enhance my blog template to enable some 3-d interactive javascript plotting package.
• table of data points, probably a JSON or CSV file resource somehow fed to the plotting package at run time.

the dimensions of the plot

[[from the reply, to be elaborated]]

• Creativity of the concept: from 0 — totally derivative extension of existing ideas to 100 — fundamentally innovative concept.
• Communication ability: from 0 — the bare invention by a solo inventor; 50 — the invention plus a manifesto about it, so we can appreciate the potential utility; 100 — invention is a team effort, creator recruits, motivates and coordinates a large team of contributors;
• Personal mastery of the tools of the trade: from 0 — none (and how can such a creator succeed?) to 100 — master of existing techniques and creator of new ones. (This dimension could/should arguably be split into sub-dimensions, one for each relevant skill…)

Might add a dimension trying to capture the degree of impact the invention had on society or the world -- whoo, boy!

the data points

Who's in, who's out (and why), and the inevitable wrangling on where each creator fits on each scale.

Might be JSON, preferably CSV. Depends on what data editor I can find (beyond Google Sheets?)

From TFA:

• “Jules Verne predicted the Submarine”
• “Edward Bellamy predicted credit cards”
• “E.M. Forster predicted the internet”
• “Arthur C Clarke predicted smart devices”
• “Ray Bradbury predicted voice recognition”

My addons. We know (or at least can find out) more about the degree of collaboration vs indivdual effort for these.

• Larry Niven predicted a practical Dyson Sphere
• Thomas Edison realized a practical electric light, also an electrical power generation and distribution system to light it. Phonograph (not sure how much initial creativity here).
• Elon Musk -- autonomous boring machines and cars, constellations of satellites (or is this just sky internet?)
• Mark Zuckerberg -- famously wrote most/all of the code for intial Facebook. Invented social network.

(many more...)

The Result

Lessons learned and conclusions