And fiction has been key to inspiring the next generation of scientists/engineers.
So many NASA people have claimed to be inspired by Star Trek just to pick one.
Thing is that AI can help. My SO worked in a firm that does skill extraction from CVs and job ads. They do really cool stuff to match job ads with CVs using EU skill tags! It's a really good tool to do specific things, so I really hate all the latest articles about LLMs.
I do find myself ignoring this kind of article, too, usually. I really enjoy discovering a totally new domain where the technology is implemented in a totally new way, going well beyond language applications even.
I dream of a ‘language’ model that specializes in general machine to machine communication. It almost surely exists already, but in my line of work, machine interfacing is an endless nightmare. A ‘protocol droid’ would be such a help.
TOS ran 1966-june3rd1969, Russia first landed unmanned in 1959, and the human race through NASA and the Apollo program first landed on the moon on june 20th 1969
Isaac Asimov was a biochemist born in 1920, started writing published sci-fi in 1939 and full on scifi novels in 1950 (seriously, this stuff was wayyyyy ahead of its time). Died in 1992.