Ever since the invention of language, humans have told each other stories. Many of these stories are simple facts, but others involve analysis or planning for the future, while some are completely fictional. Furthermore, you can often communicate more effectively when what you say/write is “story-shaped” (good logical flow, the reader can follow along, interesting throughout). Even in scientific research, papers are often crafted to be more of a “story” and less of a collection of related important facts. There are many types of stories, and many ways to tell them, but getting people to listen, understand, and spread the word essentially involves storytelling.
It makes sense that people want to learn from stories which are “factual” or related to the real world in some way, but why do people like fiction so much? This is a complex question that I don’t intend to answer here, but I can think of a few reasons. One is that fiction is entertaining, and can be made more entertaining than real life. Another is that it allows people to safely explore hypothetical scenarios that connect to their own lives or society more broadly in some way. We could probably come up with more reasons, but to me the power of fiction to explore hypotheticals is its strongest attribute.
The reasons behind our enjoyment of fiction relates to how fiction actually impacts our lives. This is basically the old debate about art imitating life vs. life imitating art, as authors’ life experience shapes the works they create, but to what extent does experiencing fiction shape peoples’ experiences? Trivially, people will spend their time reading, watching, and playing out fictional scenarios, but how much does that impact their subsequent lives and actions?
The medium itself plays a role in this. While writing allows you to think about the text at your own pace and gives you the freedom to imagine things yourself based on the written description of what’s happening, film can be much more visceral, as the combination of visuals and sound resembles the way people remember events and thereby lends itself to being processed as a more directly “real” event. Comics and graphic novels sit somewhere between these, with more direct visuals than the former but less continuous “reality” than the latter. Video games take fiction a step further by fleshing out a world with mechanics you can interact with, giving the player agency in a way that movies and books don’t (except to some limited extent with decision tree “choose-your-own-adventure” style works). Especially in multiplayer games, this begins to take on a reality of its own (such as EVE Online’s virtual economy with millions of dollars of value being traded each month), becoming less fictional and more like a board game or sport.
One way that fiction can affect our lives is by having a moral message to sell the audience on. Whether through putting yourself in the place of a character going through certain events or through witnessing what happens in the story itself, stories can exemplify what to do and not to do. If you put on your fedora, you could argue that religion is essentially fiction with a moral message, while utopian and dystopian novels are the clearest non-religious examples of this. However, you can enjoy a work even if you disagree with some of the implications. This results in a certain kind of “fan” fiction that preserves the setting but deliberately reinterprets the original work in a way that inverts or subverts the original’s premises. Examples of this genre include Wicked, Maleficent, and The Last Ringbearer (a Russian novel that portrays the Dark Lord’s forces as rational, industrializing modernizers fighting against the war-mongering Elves and Gandalf).
Science fiction is a particularly powerful way to explore what possible futures might look like. When discussing how hypothetical technological, social, and other developments could play out, people readily turn to fictional examples for illustration of what they mean. One common example when discussing possible AI futures is the Culture series by Iain M. Banks, where AIs rule over humanity in a relatively benevolent manner. I have seen people cite this as one of the better possible outcomes, and it seems relevant that Elon Musk named two SpaceX ships after ships from this series. Of course, on the other end, there are the Terminator movies, which despite their inclusion of relatively far-fetched technologies like time travel are used as a catch-all example of AI gone wrong. There’s also an interesting process in science fiction where people speculatively imagine what future technologies might enable us to do, then a subset of those technologies actually come about, and then those new technologies often enable us to imagine the future even more vividly, going from books to movies and video games with increasingly impressive special effects. Unfortunately, a lot of books are about how things can go wrong, both because it is easier to imagine this than a utopia and because it makes for more interesting reading. I’m not sure what a plausible utopia would look like myself, or how we could get there, but the paucity of these scenarios is worrying.