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Isaac Asimov's 50-Year-Old Prediction For 2014 Is Viral and Wrong

Posted by Soulskill on from the so-just-like-everything-else-on-the-internet dept.

Daniel_Stuckey writes "The media is currently praising Isaac Asimov's vision for 2014, which he articulated in a New York Times opinion piece in 1964. The sci-fi writer imagined visiting the 2014 World Fair, and the global culture and economy the exhibits might reflect. NPR called his many predictions, which range from cordless smart telephones, to robots running our leisure society, to machine-cooked 'automeals,' 'right on.' Business Insider called the forecast 'spot on.' The Huffington Post called the projections 'eerily accurate.' The only thing is, they're not. Taken as a whole, Asimov's vision for 2014 is wildly off. It's more that 'Genius predicted the future 50 years ago' makes for a great article hook. Asimov does hit a couple pretty close to home: He got pretty close to guessing the world population (6.5 billion); he anticipated automated cars ('vehicles with 'robot brains'"); and he seems to have described the current smartphone/tablet craze ('sight-sound' telephones that 'can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books.') But he also thought we'd have a colony on the moon, be living under a global population control regime, eating at multi-flavored algae bars, and letting machines prepare us personalized meals. Most divergent of all, he believed that increasing automatization of labor would spawn not inequality or joblessness, but spiritual malaise."

5 of 385 comments (clear)

  1. Link to Asimov's actual article by fv · · Score: 5, Informative

    The summary links to four different commentaries but not Asimov's original article. I'd rather get it from the source.

    1. Re:Link to Asimov's actual article by cruff · · Score: 3, Informative

      On reading the original I think it is amazingly accurate.

      To me, it didn't seem that accurate in terms of the number of correct predictions. The overall flavor of his predictions seems reasonable, however. After all, he predicted flying cars of a type, and they are still not here. I want my flying car!

    2. Re:Link to Asimov's actual article by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      In 2009, I read an article in a newspaper science supplement while in London (I wish I could remember which). The author looked at predictions and found that overall, technical and scientific extrapolations tend to be good while social and cultural predictions are almost always wrong. The primary reason is that people don't change and these sorts of predictions usually assume change.

      Interestingly, the analysis showed that the most accurate predictions tend to be by environmentalists, the opposite of what most non-scientists believe.

  2. Re:Biggest oops by ahaweb · · Score: 5, Informative

    The next world's fair will be in Milan, Italy, 2015. http://www.milanworldsfair.com/

  3. Re:I beg to differ by Stormy+Dragon · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is a myth that's repeatedly been debunked. US industrial output has grown steadily since the 1960's, it's only industrial employment that has been dropping:

    http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/02/us-manufacturing-is-not-dead.html

    Manufacturing jobs are not going over sees, they're disappearing completely. Much like we once went from a society where most people were involved in agriculture to one where a few percent can produce more food than the rest of society can consume, we're now in similar process in manufacturing.