I built this map as an exercise to stretch my thinking beyond traditional SaaS. Spend enough years automating mundane workflows and your sense of "what's possible" quietly shrinks to dashboards and workflows. So I catalogued every technology idea I could take seriously and asked what's possible, plausible, and probable over the next few decades. It's meant to inspire more than predict - it worked on me, so I thought I'd share it.
The constellation holds ideas across six domains, each tagged with a theme and maturity stage and connected to the companies working on it right now. It mixes prediction, provocation, and reality: the wonderful, the weird, and the sort of worrying.1 The edges are the interesting part. Follow them and you can see how today's tools chain together into technologies that haven't been realised yet.
Some of the stars came from science fiction, mined from Technovelgy2, an index of nearly 3,700 inventions dreamed up in sci-fi stories. About a quarter of them exist today. Edward Bellamy described credit cards in 1888, sixty years before anyone issued one. Jules Verne wrote live news broadcasts in 1889; CNN arrived in the 1980s. Jonathan Swift put a sentence-writing machine in Gulliver's Travels in 1726, and depending on how you squint, that's Google or ChatGPT with a 270-year head start. Fiction doesn't just imagine the frontier, it runs decades ahead of it.
Across the 850 built ideas with usable dates, the median gap between the story and the shipping product is 24 years - one working career, which makes the map less century-scale dreaming and more a preview of the 2040s. The authors weren't equally good at it either: over half of what H.G. Wells and Frederik Pohl imagined has been built, while Edmond Hamilton's pulp gadgets sit at 9%.
And most of the frontier is still unclaimed. Of the 3,746 ideas in the sheet, 2,780 have no real-world counterpart yet, and the built quarter skews digital - 32% of the software ideas exist against 23% of the hardware ones, even though the authors imagined twice as many physical inventions as digital ones. The easy futures were software. The unclaimed ones are physical.
References
Footnotes
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Imperial Tech Foresight - horizon scans of the possible, plausible, and probable futures of technology, and the seed material for the core catalogue. See in particular the Table of Disruptive Technologies (100 potentially disruptive technologies across five themes) and Automated Futures, a celestial-sphere map of how AI tools and techniques link together - the phrase "prediction, provocation and reality" is theirs. ↩
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Technovelgy - an index of inventions and ideas from science fiction, each tagged with the originating story, author, and year. Stats from the Not Boring compilation of it in this Google Sheet: 3,746 entries, 966 of which have been built. ↩