What If We Could Force Politicians To Watch Dystopian Sci-Fi?

It's the nightmare scenario of any early technology adopter. A company called Second Sight was once creating and implanting so-called "bionic eyes" to help near-blind patients to see the world. Now the company is going under, their software is obsolete and those patients are in danger of going blind from their now unsupported bionic eyes. The story isn't science fiction, though it certainly could be.

The work of Chinese architect Quin Wu is fiction, though a series of dystopian images he released seem eerily plausible. Whether works of art, or dystopian fears becoming reality, what makes them so powerful and memorable is that they are all stories.

Fact or fiction, these stories shift perspectives. In a world where tech-illiterate politicians routinely struggle to grasp the implications of technology, perhaps dystopian science fiction is the answer. If fiction can help legislators imagine the future we don't want, they could more effectively pass legislation to try and prevent that future from happening in the first place.