From Prof Jack Lewis | By Troy Camplin | Reading fiction opens the door to innovation. Shortly after clocks were introduced to Japan in the sixteenth century, Japanese inventors used the principles underlying the clock’s movements to create robots. True, those robots were merely mechanical dolls, but they could often do quite intricate tasks, like serving tea and writing Japanese characters. This idea that mechanical objects could—and should—be made animate and even human, is a deep part of Japanese culture. That helps to explain why the Japanese remain at the forefront of robotic technology. You could make the argument that if one were interested in becoming a robotics engineer, an excellent way of doing so would be to become more Japanese. But how does one become more Japanese? The answer is: fiction. When we read a work of fiction, we…