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Isaac Asimov's 50-Year-Old Prediction For 2014 Is Viral and Wrong
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."
There is a lot less influence from religion and a far greater part of social contact is indirectly, through devices.
Our current spiritual "average" situation may wel look like malaise to somebody living in 1964.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Don't be so dismissive of recipes.
The 2nd thing that the printing press was used for was recipes.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I have yet to see how inequality and joblessness don't cause "spiritual malaise" as a consequence. At least they certainly have "serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences", even if not along the same pathway. Ask your psychiatrist.
Ezekiel 23:20
The science and technology are amazingly accurate, the social and cultural changes are not even close; and really the social and cultural issues are far more important. A guaranteed income, mass joblessness, and and strict population controls would all have much, much larger effects on the world we live in than video conferencing and drones on Mars.
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
multi-flavor algae: Sodium alginate is a major food additive. many flavors.
global population control regime:
china we all know about:
uzbekistan: forced sterilization or IUD.
india: more than two children and you can't particiapte in many elective offices
iran: manadatory contraception to obtain marriage lic.
USA: ask Sarah Palin what she thinks of Title X
Israel: ordered sterilizations.
Auomated custom meal preparation robots:
http://www.psfk.com/2012/11/burger-making-robot.html#!rgOyn
Automated labor sparks malaise:
Foxcon suicide fences. no layoffs just repetitive work that machines won't do.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Your business is obviously not providing much, if any, added value if you can't make it profitable without an endless supply of desperate people to exploit. It would be an awesome boost to economy to have such living dead enterprises go under and release the resources they've tie up for the use of actually profitable ones.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.