Anders Sandberg on Fred Polak's classic: imagined futures drive built ones
anderssandberg · x · 2026-10-06
Oxford researcher Anders Sandberg, discussing Fred Polak's classic The Image of the Future, argues Polak was clearly right that we think about the future through images and make them real — though his prospective theory fails (Rome is a counterexample).
He extends this into a feedback loop: how many people building technology today first encountered the future through art like sci-fi, then spent their lives making some version of it real? Imagining a future can itself be one of the forces that brings it into existence — art and stories really do matter.
Related event: How Imagined Futures Shape the Technology We Build(2 posts)→
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