Transcript: How Can The Simpsons Predict The Future? - Barry Kudrowitz

Read the full transcript of researcher Barry Kudrowitz’s talk titled “How Can The Simpsons Predict The Future?” at TEDxMinneapolis 2025 conference.

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TRANSCRIPT:

BARRY KUDROWITZ: The Simpsons writers are often referred to as prophets, predicting the future years in advance. Lady Gaga flying into the Super Bowl halftime show in almost the same outfit five years beforehand. Homer calculating the mass of the Higgs boson 14 years before scientists at CERN proved its existence. And perhaps the most discussed, Trump becoming president 17 years before it happened.

The writers are not prophets. What I propose is happening is that you have creative writers making absurd but educated predictions about the future based on current technology, trends, history. This is the same thing that science fiction writers have done forever.

Now I’m going to make a pretty bold statement that in addition to science fiction, comics and cartoons are more than just trivial entertainment for kids and adults, and they’re actually a critical player in the advancement of technology and society.

Creative Predictions and the Adjacent Possible

Now, why am I the best person to talk to this? Well, by day I’m a mild-mannered design professor and department head at a major metropolitan R1 university, engaged in a never-ending research for the truth about creativity and innovation. And by night I play video games and I watch a lot of cartoons. Now, when my powers combine, I make a lot of really nerdy graphs, like plotting when certain concepts come about in fiction and when they eventually become reality.

Fifty years before it was invented, Arthur C. Clarke proposed a personal communication device that can tell you your exact location on the planet. How many of you have a device like that on you right now? Fifty years before it was invented, Dick Tracy had a cell phone in his watch. How many of you have a device like that on you right now? One hundred years before it happened, Jules Verne had this impossible science fiction concept of taking people and putting them on the moon.

Now, in his own words, what Jules Verne does is not prophecy. He says he is simply taking emerging technology at the time and weaving it together into an engaging narrative. Take 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, for example. This stemmed from his visit to the Paris Universal Expo, which is a little bit like the consumer electronics show of today, where there was a pavilion dedicated to this new concept of electricity next to a pavilion dedicated to this new concept of submarines, including a submarine named Nautilus.

What Jules Verne was doing was playing in the adjacent possible. The adjacent possible is like a zone of next possible steps for any given technology. So here’s another one of my nerdy graphs showing the evolution of telecommunications devices. And you can see the adjacent possible at the end there. And that is where designers and creative writers have permission to play pretend. And sometimes the things they come up with actually become real with advancements in science and technology.

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Technology S-Curves and Superhero Tech

This is a really good place to introduce a technology S-curve. So an S-curve plots how a technology moves from emerging to state-of-the-art to obsolete. But I believe that an S-curve actually starts sooner in the adjacent possible. So here is my modified S-curve, now showing the adjacent possible, but I’ve also plotted different superhero technologies representative of the different phases of the S-curve.

Now the cool thing about technology is that everything around us was once emerging tech. If you think back to old episodes of, I don’t know, Star Trek or Batman, all that futuristic technology does not look futuristic anymore. It just, we don’t realize how far we’ve come until we look back at prior technology.

So let’s look back at some prior technology. So here’s the first cell phone. It looked like a briefcase. It weighed 40 pounds and it was only a phone. People still thought it wasn’t impressive. Future people are gonna look back at our current phones the same way we look back at briefcase phone. They’re gonna say, “Can you believe people had to carry around this device and they pulled it out of their pocket when they wanted to call someone, and they opened a phone app, they figured out who they wanted to call, they pushed send, and then they had to hold this thing up to their ear the entire time they were talking to somebody. And then when they were driving a car, they put a clip in the air-conditioning unit, and then they put their phone in that clip, and they looked at their phone while they were driving.”

The Rapid Pace of Technological Change

Let’s zoom back even further. So this is the concept of Carl Sagan’s cosmic calendar, where you take the history of the earth and you boil it down to one calendar year, where bacteria come about in March and humans come about on December 31st at 11:30 p.m.

Now if we zoom in to the last second of this calendar year, one cosmic second, that’s about 150 years, a lot has happened in that short amount of time. We went from not having electricity or light bulbs in our houses to having a device like this that we can use to communicate with anyone on the planet.

If I took this back 50 years or a hundred years from now, and I showed it to somebody 50 years ago, they would think I was a wizard. “You’re a wizard, Barry,” they would say, right? The same thing would happen if I took a technology from 50 years in our future, and I showed it to you on stage right now. You would think it was magic, or a trick, or alien technology. You might not even be able to comprehend what you are looking at.

That is exactly what happened to Edison and why he was called the Wizard of Menlo Park, because of his cutting-edge technologies.

Like the phonograph, that was the first time you could record and playback sound. All things that were innovative were once impossible or radical.

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The Three Components of Innovation

So what makes something innovative? Well, there’s three parts to innovation. Novelty, feasibility, and value. And on the borderline of feasibility and the borderline of value, this is where concepts are just one step away from being innovative, but they come across as absurd, or silly, or futuristic.

I’m going to share two examples with you from fiction, of concepts that moved from absurdity into innovation. One crossing the value line, and one crossing the feasibility line.

So Shel Silverstein wrote this poem called “Something New.” And the poem is a joke, and it lists a bunch of intentionally bad product ideas that lack value. And one of those ideas is mustard ice cream. But mustard ice cream is now real. It was made by Chef Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck, with his dish, Red Cabbage Gazpacho, with Pomery Grain Mustard Ice Cream.

Now at first, that might sound offensive to some of you, but if you think about the ingredients, it makes more sense. Cabbage and mustard are in the same Brastica vegetable family. Cabbage and cream appear together in many dishes, including soups. Heston Blumenthal took a concept that was absurd, and he moved it into innovation by finding hidden value.

From Fiction to Reality

Let’s move on to the feasibility side. So in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka invents a bunch of impossible candy concepts. Actually, in the book, Grandpa Joe says, “these are impossible and completely absurd.” Things like sugar balloons that you can blow up and eat. Grant Ackett’s did that at Alinea. Or gum that changes flavor as you chew it. Well, Stride did that with Stride Shift Gum. Or ice cream that doesn’t melt and can be served hot. Well, we now have stabilizers that you can add to ice cream to keep it from melting. And with methylcellulose, you can create ice cream that can be served hot, just like Mr. Wonka described in the book.

All of these impossible concepts moved from absurdity to innovation when advancements in technology move them across the feasibility line. Hot ice cream, mustard ice cream. This represents the gray zone where innovation lies dormant. But things here come across as absurd.

Now, Einstein says, “If at first an idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” So if we want to be innovative, we need to embrace absurdity. And cartoons are very good at being absurd. Because cartoons are not real. And you can do anything in a cartoon. Even people watching a cartoon are more open to stuff than if they were watching real people.

As a very simple example, let’s look at Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Things You Can Think. Now, this book is a bunch of different fantastic imaginary places. And one of the places is Dadaic, which is this impossible island structure made of concentric circles that allow you to walk out into the middle of the ocean on a narrow strip of land. Well, Dubai did that with the Palm Islands. What, in line with the message of the book, the things you can think of can become real. But it starts with thinking of those silly, wondrous, absurd things.

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Cartoons as Innovation Catalysts

Now, let’s say you have an animated world that also takes place in the future. Now the writers have double the ability to play in the adjacent possible. Take the Jetsons, for example. Rosie the Robot became real when iRobot released the Roomba.

Now you can also have an animated world that features inventors. So take Wallace, for example, from Wallace and Gromit. Wallace invented the mechanical trousers. We now have mechanical trousers that healthcare providers wear to carry patients or soldiers used to carry large loads long distances.

And then there’s the trifecta for playing in the adjacent possible, which I call the Farnsworth-Sanchez bubblegum effect, named after three shows that feature animated inventors from the future.

I started with a Simpsons example. I’m going to end with a Simpsons example. The tomacco. So in a 1999 episode of the Simpsons, Homer crosses a tomato plant with a tobacco plant to produce a nicotine-enhanced fruit. A fan of the show tried grafting a tomato plant to a tobacco root stem and produced an actual tomacco.

Now it’s said that the writers of the show got their inspiration from a Scientific American article that did the exact inverse, grafting a tobacco plant to a tomato root stem to produce nicotine-free tobacco. This is a great example of this dialogue between engineers and scientists and writers and comedians and cartoonists, from science fact to science fiction to science fact, that pushes society forward.

Conclusion

Creative writers, like Jules Verne or the Simpsons writers, are inspired by current technology. They then go and they play in the adjacent possible, in the absurdity zones just outside value and just outside feasibility, and then their creative works inspire scientists and engineers.

Now in our society today, we tend to celebrate the scientists and engineers as the ones who are creating new technologies, but it’s more like a partnership with creative writers and cartoonists and humorists. If we want to be more innovative, we need to continue to fund the arts and humanities. We need to continue to have recess in our schools and parents of kids and kidults, instead of saying, “I think you’ve had enough cartoons and video games today,” maybe we should be saying, “have you had enough cartoons and video games today?”

Thank you.

Transcript: How Can The Simpsons Predict The Future? – Barry Kudrowitz