Technological forecasting (TF) emerged in the late nineteenth century, blending science and fiction primarily for entertainment. As science fiction gained popularity and attracted scientifically trained authors like H. G. Wells, its purpose shifted from entertainment to warning, advocacy, propaganda, and special pleading, without accountability.
Technology assessment (TA) emerged, in part, as an effort to make future explorations usable for policy and governance. The 1937 US Government report,
Professionalization of TF after the war narrowed imagination. Trend extrapolation, modeling, and expert judgment privileged calculability over plausibility and consensus over dissent. Then, geopolitical and structural crises of the 1970s exposed the limits of model-driven futures, thus provoking innovations in foresight and roadmapping that valued network adaptation over predictive accuracy. Over the same period, TA’s continued institutional growth experienced a similar trend towards including criteria, such as ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of emerging technologies.
In both domains transitions proved incomplete. TA’s ELSI turn produced important studies but often lacked integration into policy and decision-making. A twenty-first century reboot brought methodological innovations such as real-time technology assessment, constructive technology assessment, anticipatory governance, and responsible innovation. TF, however, moved more toward larger data sets and computation, and less toward stakeholder engagement and transdisciplinary collaborations.
Both trajectories now face a common challenge: moving from data to narratives that resonate with the non-experts, the everyday people who happen to be the primary audience for science fiction. Experts can assess what is plausible, feasible, or strategically relevant; publics give voice to what is desirable, legitimate, just, or intolerable.
This is where speculative fiction re-enters TF and TA, not as entertainment or unaccountable advocacy, but as disciplined imagination. When paired with public participation, fiction can help translate forecasts into more plausible futures and explore possibilities that models cannot enumerate. The trajectory is not a return to fiction. It is a transformation from imagination without accountability and prediction without imagination toward exploration with accountability.