CONCEPT
Fantasy Inventions
Basalla's term for artifacts imagined in fiction, mythology, or speculative thought long before the technical means to build them exist — a reservoir of potential variation that shapes both what inventors attempt to build and what the selection environment is prepared to adopt.
Fantasy inventions are the imagined artifacts that precede the real ones by decades or centuries — Daedalus's wings, Leonardo's ornithopter, Jules Verne's submarine, H.G. Wells's atomic bomb, Edward Bellamy's credit card, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and the long lineage of thinking machines from the golem through Hal 9000 to Samantha from Her. Basalla argued that these imagined artifacts are not merely entertainment. They constitute a reservoir of potential variation that operates through two channels: they shape the direction of inventive effort by marking certain artifacts as desirable, and they prime the selection environment by establishing cultural expectations that the real artifact can eventually fill. The fantasy does not predict the future. It shapes the niche that the future artifact must fill.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The directional channel operates because inventors do not explore the space of possible artifacts randomly. They explore in directions that their culture has