You’re a twentysomething looking forward to your friend’s birthday at a popular nightclub. You walk up to your car, the door opens and you drive to the club. Speed is limited to 70mph in this mode but that’s fine, there’s no rush. You arrive to the spot where you’re meeting your friends, so you tell your car to go and find a parking space and charge up, at one of the automatic bays around town. You step out and the car sails off. Several hours later you realise you have found your limit; although tomorrow is a Sunday, you don’t want it to be one of those nights again. While in the queue to get your coat you tell your car to circle the block, and stumbling out of the club you jump in the back seat, take off at top speed and wake up at home.

If this sounds like mundane science fiction you’re right. But it was the image in my head after discovering that both Google and Tesla are working, possibly together, on developing a fully self-driving car.

The idea of a self driving vehicle exists as far back as the legend of the Magic carpet, where fantasy and human imagination went what technology could never have thought to achieve.

A future with the norm being automatic control of personal motor vehicles, like in 2004’s I, Robot, or arguably in concept with the magic carpet, isn’t the first time science fiction started manifesting itself in reality. The idea of webcam chatting was explored here in 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, 45 years ago.

This idea was shown in film as far back as the visionary silent film Metropolis, in 1927. Talking wordlessly to the dead has existed in many ancient and tribal cultures throughout history in legends and religion. And today, science fiction and other fantasy storytelling serves as a kind of ‘idea porn’, where creators map out possible realities, indirectly helping us to percieve and help plan for possible futures. Imagining something and making it are linked; many other stories have ended up being dreams of our material future.

On a side note, there is often something incomplete about some of these myths: the idea of exclusivity. Like with Aladdin’s Magic Lamp, the story usually highlights one magical object that only the protagonist can rightly possess. Perhaps this represent our longing to feel special, but this feeling that comes from within, therefore it can’t be a realistic goal to manifest that part. Maybe Syndrome was right - The evolution of technology to fulfill our dreams in fact shows a breaking away from that part of the fantasy, a figurative democratisation of magic.