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."

Comments

Link to Asimov's actual article

[fv]

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

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[the eric conspiracy]

On reading the original I think it is amazingly accurate.

Thanks for the link.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[Samantha Wright]

Not to be confused with this link to when we discussed these predictions on Slashdot, back in August. Really, I'm surprised Asimov didn't predict that we'd still have dupes in 2014.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[cruff]

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!

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[_Sharp'r_]

Asimov did predict that alpha particles would have the potential to disrupt computer memory back in 1952.....

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[MozeeToby]

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.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

and in the 2014 Futurama will show a model of an elaborate Martian colony

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[HeckRuler]

If only we could explain what causes this upheaval of the status quo that lead to social and cultural issues. Surely it's the not automation taking jobs while still supplying a net gain in resources! That would never explain why the masses have shit jobs, yet the nation can still support the dole.

A guaranteed income,

Welfare, housing assistance, charity. It's rough, but the basics are provided for if you go out and get them.

mass joblessness,

Underemployment. College grads are flipping burgers.

and strict population controls

China did it. But yeah, it's really not a problem for first-worlders. Asimov didn't see that coming.

would all have much, much larger effects on the world we live in

You're using the term "would have" like these things didn't come to pass.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[boristdog]

I guess he didn't know it would get cancelled for good in 2013.

Or did it?

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[timeOday]

But those cultural changes have come true to quite a degree. Granted, instead of complete mass joblessness, we have a significant decrease in the workforce participation rate (i.e. joblessness) but more significantly an explosion in service industry jobs, along with income subsidies of various types since the jobs are not economically necessary enough to provide a living wage. As for strict population controls, the most populous nation on earth introduced a strict population control 14 years after the prediction (China One Child Policy) and birth rates are widely tumbling. I will grant the main population control elsewhere around the world is through cultural controls rather than legal, but the net effect is certainly similar.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[fiannaFailMan]

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.

It figures. In his writing, the scientific concepts were pretty mind-blowing, but the characters were flat as pancakes and the dialog was abysmal. He struck me as a writer who understands technology a lot better than its effects on people, and he didn't seem to be in tune with how people interact.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[gbjbaanb]

to be fair, he wasn't so far off on population control - China's only just relaxed its one-child policy. A lot of Africa's kids still get "controlled" by natural causes, and a lot of western society's kids simply don't get born like they used to because of the financial or social constraints many in the West subject themselves to (ie rich and middle class families are not having many kids because they can't afford it, or couldn't support children in their oh-so-important careers).

I guess the societal changes were much more difficult to predict, given the complexity of society and cultures.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[speederaser]

I want my flying car!

Ok, here ya go. Not too old, very good shape and only $408,000!

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[mosb1000]

we have a significant decrease in the workforce participation rate

Labor force participation has been down in recent years, but it's still higher than it was 50 years ago.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[timeOday]

Under the conditions of the 20th century there was a trend towards higher workforce participation with tasks traditionally relegated to housewives being shifted to third parties or technology. Some of that may me be shifted back to home labor.

But stay-at-home parents have not returned to traditional home chores - sewing clothes and scrubbing them clean on river rocks, tending crops, grinding meal, gathering water and firewood, tending to or butchering animals, churning butter, beating rugs and so on. Instead they largely do work that would previously have been considered enriching recreation - shuttling kids to teams, clubs, and lessons. Or preparing meals that are essentially a luxury - higher quality, but largely more expensive than, a machine-prepared (frozen) or fast-food meal. This is not to mention time spent at the gym, shopping for junk, or burnishing a facebook page. And shuttling kids around appears to be on the verge of obsolescence as well due to automated driving. I say all this as the supporter of a stay-at-home spouse and 4 kids. (For people who do have meaningful, well-paying work the "future" of 2014 is pretty good!)

Re: Link to Asimov's actual article

[peragrin]

60 years ago the majority of women were not allowed to work.

Only 96 years ago were women even counted as citizens who could vote.

By doubling the potentional work force. Wages stagnated. Of course I would rather live in a world were people are equal rather than one were one group thinks there better based on stupid shit like skin color or gender.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[Anonymous Coward]

Welp, the technology certainly exists, but society is simply too cautious to give the populace easy access to aviator licenses.

This make me wonder if there's anyone who predicted that safety concerns, not technological constraints would be the thing that keeps flying cars from being mass produced. That person deserves a quick thumbs up.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[samkass]

- Access to affordable birth control. In third world countries, birth control isn't always affordable or easy to come by.

These predictions were made in 1964. "The pill" had just become available for birth control use in the United States a few years previous, but only in some states and only to married women... it wasn't generally available to any woman who wanted it in all states until the early 70's. Maybe it was because he was a male, but not realizing the impact this would have on the (developed) world seems to be one of his bigger oversights.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[HiThere]

Larry Niven, among others. Jack Williamson. I think a few others. I can't remember any that were set in the near future, though. Not before it started happening.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[mcgrew]

The science and technology are amazingly accurate, the social and cultural changes are not even close

You make me think of Murray Leinster's A Logic Named Joe. Leinster predicted the internet in 1946 but got society wrong; times change.

Nobody can predict people.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[Midnight_Falcon]

On reading the original I think it is amazingly accurate.

Really? I just read the original and found it to be wildly inaccurate. The basic thesis, in my understanding, is that by 2014 automation will have replaced the need for us to do the majority of mundane work, such as walking down the sidewalk, driving, or preparing our own meals. This obviously has not happened.

Claims of nuclear fission powering the electric grid globally and isotope batteries are well outside of tangibility with the current state of science.

Scientists also most recently discovered how to make a small amount of artificial meat, enough for a "bite size" after months and months. Asimov claims we'll all be eating "pseudosteak" in 2014 -- obviously getting this product to the level where it can be mass consumed will take many, many years.

In the end I find Asimov's predictions to be overconfident in the advancement of science and abundance of technology in the world at the time frame that he believed. As such, his predictions from a technological standpoint seem like that may well be a century off.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[ignavus]

Not to be confused with this link to when we discussed these predictions on Slashdot, back in August. Really, I'm surprised Asimov didn't predict that we'd still have dupes in 2014.

No, Slashdot back then was just predicting this discussion today. It is truly amazing the foresight that Slashdot has: it often can predict a discussion weeks before it even happens, and even give samples of what that future discussion will be like. Amazing.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[Chalnoth]

Welfare, housing assistance, charity. It's rough, but the basics are provided for if you go out and get them.

Knowing a number of extremely poor people, this isn't even remotely true. Especially not of late, when we have the national and state governments cutting back so severely on various programs to help the poor. I have one friend, for example, who has precisely zero normal income (due to various family issues and an untreated disability). Yet she has an incredibly hard time getting any sort of aid, because she has no proof of income!

This is why we need an unconditional basic income, instead of all these stupid programs. The very large number of conditions set on the various programs to help the poor end up guaranteeing that many extremely poor people get left out, if only because they have a hard time supplying the paperwork to prove that they qualify. Poor people also very frequently have a hard time traveling any significant distance, meaning that if they live in rural America, traveling to the various government offices to apply for aid becomes a significant burden. Some of the required documents (e.g. birth certificate) also come along with charges that are difficult to cover.

There is no good reason for this. Nobody deserves to be left destitute on the street, so we should just guarantee a base level of income so that nobody has to. Get your Social Security card, and get your monthly check, end of story (paid for with a moderate hike in income taxes). That way almost nobody will fall through the cracks.

And the most awesome thing about a guaranteed basic income that is high enough: if it is high enough that not working becomes a viable option, then it will break the stranglehold that employers have over their employees. Employers will actually have to provide decent working conditions and/or pay, or they will quickly find themselves without employees.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

"Dupes" kinda sounds like a temporal law enforcement department in an old Lester Del Ray short story.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[DexterIsADog]

I like Niven's take - you can fly over a city, but only on automatic. Flying manually over a populated area is a capital crime, and you wind up in the organ banks.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[DexterIsADog]

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.

It figures. In his writing, the scientific concepts were pretty mind-blowing, but the characters were flat as pancakes and the dialog was abysmal. He struck me as a writer who understands technology a lot better than its effects on people, and he didn't seem to be in tune with how people interact.

You're right, he was clueless about people. As part of his security entourage at a couple of Star Trek cons in NY (don't ask), I spent plenty of time talking with him and observing. Very nice guy (he wrote me a personalized limerick about having two penises!), but not very perceptive about people.

Re: Link to Asimov's actual article

[Peyna]

If my employees can receive a check for not working that is higher than what I am willing to pay them to work (or, probably even lower than, because who would work a full time job if you're only going to make a few bucks more than if you didn't work), what is my incentive to maintain my business at all?

Rather than pay my employees more so I can stay in business, but make less money myself, I too could simply not work and make a decent wage.

Your logic is horribly flawed.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[dbIII]

Claims of nuclear fission powering the electric grid globally and isotope batteries are well outside of tangibility with the current state of science.

Only because the nuclear lobby ate it's own children (eg. lobbying against thorium research) and left us with 1970s tech that is a useful financial instrument to fleece the taxpayer and consumer but a poor technical instrument.
With orders of magnitude more spent on lobbying than R&D and high profile sinecures for cronies it should have been expected.

Re: Link to Asimov's actual article

[tragedy]

what is my incentive to maintain my business at all?

That's a good question. What _is_ your incentive to maintain your business at all? If you can't think of why you should maintain it in a hypothetical world with a basic income, why should you be able to think of a reason to maintain it in the world we currently live in? Why don't you just get a minimum wage job flipping burgers?

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[Megol]

On reading the original I think it is amazingly accurate.

Really? I just read the original and found it to be wildly inaccurate. The basic thesis, in my understanding, is that by 2014 automation will have replaced the need for us to do the majority of mundane work, such as walking down the sidewalk, driving, or preparing our own meals. This obviously has not happened.

Claims of nuclear fission powering the electric grid globally and isotope batteries are well outside of tangibility with the current state of science.

The first isn't a technical issue (unless you meant fusion), it's known how to scale up nuclear reactors and how to distribute power. Isotope batteries have been used in the past and there are no technical issues there either. If they make sense - there are a lot of advantages in high performance lithium based accumulators (Li Ion, Li polymer..) including not requiring radiation protection.

Scientists also most recently discovered how to make a small amount of artificial meat, enough for a "bite size" after months and months. Asimov claims we'll all be eating "pseudosteak" in 2014 -- obviously getting this product to the level where it can be mass consumed will take many, many years.

There have been products imitating meat since the 70ies at least. Yes, they were not real meat but e.g. soy protein processed right can have texture and taste very similar to real meat.

In the end I find Asimov's predictions to be overconfident in the advancement of science and abundance of technology in the world at the time frame that he believed. As such, his predictions from a technological standpoint seem like that may well be a century off.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[epine]

Of the last twenty TED talks, this one has the most views by nearly a two to one margin over the runner up:

David Steindl-Rast: Want to be happy? Be grateful

I personally found it upbeat yet vacuous. He doesn't specify whether in the topology of his gratitude vector space, there's a primary node where all the gratitude goes in, and no gratitude comes out (presumably due to Hawking radiation, all that gratitude is re-emitted from the fearful symmetry as cosmic love). Asimov, of course, never held the majority standard for spiritual malaise.

I am honorary president of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great, spectacularly prolific writer and scientist, Dr. Isaac Asimov in that essentially functionless capacity. At an A.H.A. memorial service for my predecessor I said, âoeIsaac is up in Heaven now.â That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. It rolled them in the aisles. Mirth! Several minutes had to pass before something resembling solemnity could be restored.

And yet ... the majority of the world's population continues to itch for any hint of a master honour roll for special snowflakes, no matter how shallowly disguised.

China did it. But yeah, it's really not a problem for first-worlders. Asimov didn't see that coming.

Brave New World was published in 1931. Asimov would have been thoroughly familiar with it. Nineteen Eighty-Four is not the only game in town concerning the control of the masses. First, we have all the drugs. Second, we do have laws forcing parents to turn their children over to the puppy mill of public education which--along with mass culture--promptly fills their heads full of all kinds of garbage, that only the most strenuous parental exertion can hope to mitigate.

So you can have a large family, but at some deep level, it's not entirely yours.

It amazes me the number of people attracted to the purity cult concerning the foods they eat (local/non-GMO/vegetarian/unprocessed), who barely blink over the obnoxiousness of the vast majority of the thousands of media impressions we soak in each day, the end result of which is that a billion people cared about two seconds of Janet Jackson's nipple.

We live in a society where it's a permanent, relentless battle to resist the frivolous.

We have this notion of "parental controls". We can keep our children ignorant of how sex functions in the real world (as opposed to the retail world), though this electronic chastity belt is ultimately futile if your child has half a brain. We can pretend we're filtering out violence. Yet most violence is social, and you can really only filter graphic depictions (unless sex is also involved, in which case social aggression is also considered graphic).

What you really want to filter out is not sex or violence, but stupidity, and for this the "parental control" widget has no back-lit chicklet engraved with an undiscoverable hieroglyphic rune. In 90% of MSM political coverage, they're not even trying, to put it kindly.

It was Asimov who postulated the discipline of psychohistory, in which the vacuous can be distinguished from the salient by the vigorous cranking of some vast algorithmic matrix. We've become very, very good at the vigorous cranking of vast algorithmic matrices, yet I have no channel where political figures never intrude on my consciousness unless in the act of making a substantive statement. I don't even want the operatic comedy of "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job!" Whatever.

Wake me up when it reaches the level of 'Heck of a job, Brownie' calls Bush inattentive 'fratboy'.

That could be riddled with a hundred falsehoods, disto

Re: Link to Asimov's actual article

[ultranova]

Rather than pay my employees more so I can stay in business, but make less money myself, I too could simply not work and make a decent wage.

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.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[jeremyp]

He correctly predicted mobile phones, tablets and fibre optic cables. He got the World population about right.

And that was it. Everything else was a fail.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[cascadingstylesheet]

If only we could explain what causes this upheaval of the status quo that lead to social and cultural issues. Surely it's the not automation taking jobs while still supplying a net gain in resources! That would never explain why the masses have shit jobs, yet the nation can still support the dole.

Yeah, it couldn't be the political stupidity of turning on massive spending, turning a recession into a depression.

It must be those robot armies that explain the 1930s. And the massive leaps in robotics that happened precisely in 2008/9

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[AthanasiusKircher]

I don't think you are the target demographic of the GP"s argument. You appear to earn enough with a single income so your spouse can live a life of relative luxury. Most people can't afford that -- if they have to choose whether to work or be a stay-at-home parent, the choice is about economics. "Do I go to work and pay for daycare or a nanny, or do I stay at home and raise my kids myself? Do I go to work and eat crappy take-out food and TV dinners every night because I'm too tired to cook, or do I save money by cooking at home? Do I work overtime and hire a maidservice periodically, or do I stay at home a little more and keep the house relatively clean myself?"

Many people I know who choose to be stay-at-home spouses couldn't afford to live the life you describe. Whether they can't find a job or they can't find one that they like or they just like staying at home, they also have to "pitch in" and do various tasks at home to make it economically viable for their families.

But stay-at-home parents have not returned to traditional home chores - sewing clothes and scrubbing them clean on river rocks, tending crops, grinding meal, gathering water and firewood, tending to or butchering animals, churning butter, beating rugs and so on.

The GP didn't say we were going back to the 19th century. But as someone who was effectively a stay-at-home dad for a couple years, I did in fact repair some clothes (not major sewing, but some), I did sometimes scrub stains off of clothes, I did have a little garden to grow some herbs and vegetables (though not enough to support us), and for small rugs, taking them outside and beating them a bit is actually useful. Because I believe in high-quality food, I have also at times ground my own flour and to save money I'd buy larger cuts of meat and cut them up (and sometimes grind them) myself. Although I like homemade butter, it's not really economical to make it yourself, so I don't generally do it.

I still have and use a vacuum cleaner, washing machine, etc., but where I could save some money or produce something of better quality by doing it myself, I might try it. As the GP said, I did so because I didn't have to hire a "third party" to do it instead... because that wasn't economically feasible.

Or preparing meals that are essentially a luxury - higher quality, but largely more expensive than, a machine-prepared (frozen) or fast-food meal.

I could easily prepare food that is of significantly "higher quality" than frozen foods or fast-food for a much lower cost. Aside from saving on daycare/nanny costs, the biggest economical reason to be a stay-at-home spouse is often to save on food costs. For my family to eat food that cost the same as frozen dinners and take-out food, I could certainly make luxurious meals at home with "conventional" ingredients.

And shuttling kids around appears to be on the verge of obsolescence as well due to automated driving.

I'd hardly say "on the verge of obsolescence." Lots of advances, yes, but I bet we're quite a few years away from widespread adoption... probably decades. Particularly for true automatic driving with human drivers never having to take the wheel in unusual situations, as would be required to shuttle kids without an adult "backup" driver. You really think most parents are going to trust an automatic car to ferry their "little angels" around by itself in the next couple decades? I doubt it... it will take a long time to gain people's trust.

Anyhow, again, I don't think you're the kind of family the GP was talking about. Some folks can afford to have a spouse who either works or stays at home and does very little "housework." Most families can't afford that sort of luxury.

Re: Link to Asimov's actual article

[MikeBabcock]

Your statement contained no logic itself; only suppositions.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you seen how people drive on the ground in Chicago, Detroit, LA and the Middle East?

NO FLYING CARS!

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[captainlavender]

Spoken like someone who has never been on welfare (demonstrably insufficient to live on), government housing (=/), or tried to get a job recently (less than 10% of applicants are accepted to jobs at McDonalds, by the way, and that includes a much larger than usual percentage of college grads).

Re: Link to Asimov's actual article

[cascadingstylesheet]

So when we're all sitting around collecting checks, where do the goods and services come from?

Re: Link to Asimov's actual article

[catprog]

So the owners of businesses can say you will work for nothing for me?

Sounds very much like welfare for rich business owners. (Of course if you can cheaply start your own businesses and get paid yourself, it may work.)

Re: Link to Asimov's actual article

[ultranova]

So when we're all sitting around collecting checks, where do the goods and services come from?

From businesses able and willing to pay their employees enough and treat them well enough that they can get them to work for them without needing the threat of dying in a ditch as a stick. Mr. Peyna can't do so, thus either whatever he's selling is simply not valuable enough to make a buck without being subsidized by other's misery, or he's simply a lousy businessman. Either way, his continued business represents economic perversion, not efficiency.

And yes, it's likely that you can't afford some goods and services when they're provided at their real cost (= what they cost when no one has a literal or proverbial gun against their head). At that point you need to choose whether you live without them until someone figures a more efficient way to provide them (such as automation), or join a long list of oppressors preying on their fellow man. And if you choose the latter - if you choose to join the proud tradition of every slavemaster, colonial empire and tyrant in history - do understand what you've chosen: that the best you can hope is that you'll die before your world crumbles like an obsolete bad dream it is as humanity continues to advance. But, at least you'll have plenty of cheap crap to distract yourself from having no future. I can't say if that's worth it; ask Ku Klux Klan.

For the end result it doesn't matter - the world tends towards the state of least oppression, since that's most stable, since it has least rebels - but it would be a lot less painful to make the journey in a planned, controlled manner rather than letting social pressures grow bad enough for a revolt.

Re: Link to Asimov's actual article

[volmtech]

A managed economy has to be "managed". Many jobs and services are needed but do not generate enough profit to pay a "living wage". Today desperate people take these jobs, sometimes working two, and depend on various government programs for food, housing, and healthcare. With a guaranteed income everyone who is healthy enough would still be required to look for work. Profitable businesses would pay a good portion of those profits in taxes that would go toward the guaranteed income while businesses with slim profits would pay few taxes but their employees would provide services to the community

The problem with unfettered capitalism is the less productive will be left to starve while total socialism fails because bureaucrats have no idea how to run an economy. You have to allow capitalist who are good at making money enough profits to keep them working but bleed enough away to support the excess population.

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[Phoghat]

It's more that 'Genius predicted the future 50 years ago' makes for a great article hook

It's more genius is wrong makes a great article hook

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[ihtoit]

a prototype flying car was built in 1948. I can't remember who built it, but it did fly.

Re: Link to Asimov's actual article

[gzuckier]

What would be your motivation to work if you weren't paid? I dunno, what's your motivation for posting here? Or are you getting paid?
Humans consistently demonstrate that things like social status mean more to them than money or material possessions; in various different cultures, including ours, they will bankrupt themselves throwing parties or otherwise trying to acquire status. It's just that our culture puts exceptional emphasis on material wealth as a measure of status, then justify it as herein, by asserting the silliest thing ever said, I.e. that you wouldn't be poor if you just work hard.

Re: Link to Asimov's actual article

[gzuckier]

We're partly there already, with so many working poor, people getting the minimum wage or thereabouts, who get welfare or food stamps to survive. This is welfare for the business owners as much as their employees. Might as well just guarantee everybody a minimum level of life's necessities so the minimum wage could start at zero. Employers would love that. And yet they don't like it when socialists do it.

Re: Link to Asimov's actual article

[gzuckier]

Well when you come right down to it, not counting housework, child care, etc is a flaw in the gnp or similar. If I clean my house and my neighbor cleans his house, that's not labour, but if we each clean each other's house and pay each other equal sums, now that contributes to the good of society? Reminiscent of the days not long ago when America was becoming vastly wealthy by all of us selling each other out houses at ever increasing prices.
You know, in some countries, if you stay home to take care of your disintegrating parent, the health care system pays you for it just like it would pay a stranger to do it.

Re: Link to Asimov's actual article

[gzuckier]

I just happened to read Heinlein's 1980 review of his 1950 predictions for the year 2000, and he points out how hard out is to foresee the social effects of technological change. The example he gives is that nobody saw the effect that automobiles would have on mating.
For the record, his 1950 predictions included "Your personal phone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple inquiries, and transmit vision. " Close. But he didn't foresee the social changes that would bring.

Re: Link to Asimov's actual article

[gzuckier]

Whoa, where's that /. thread on time travel from earlier today?

Re:Link to Asimov's actual article

[Jmc23]

So his fault was in assuming that we're more cooperative and intelligent than the greedy short-sighted dimwits we actually are.

Re: Link to Asimov's actual article

[HeckRuler]

Whoa there. I think you're getting the idea of a minimum wage mixed with the idea of a guaranteed income. Your argument is about a minimum wage. That if a business can't afford to pay their employees a living wage then it's not worth it to society for that business to exist.

With a guaranteed income, the threat of dying in a ditch is removed. It's no longer a burden to the business that they must provide a living wage to their employees. People are working for surplus, because they want more, because they're greedy.
If we switch to a guaranteed income, then the business's should be free to pay as little as they want since anything they pay their employees is simply gravy on top of their living wage. And everyone gets that. Even the rich. Now, a whole hell of a lot of people will simply be content and won't go to work. That'll drive up the cost of labor for shit jobs, which will further help the lower class. At least, those who want to work. The hope here is that people will be free from being wage-slaves and go do something more productive with their lives.

They are very different approaches and which you think is a better probably depends more on your philosophical outlook on human nature more than economical experiments of the past. I mean, really, this is the sort of post-scarcity scenario where we literally have enough to simply hand out food to whoever wants it.

I beg to differ

[vikingpower]

Most divergent of all, he believed that increasing automatization of labor would spawn not inequality or joblessness, but spiritual malaise.

How is this different from what we have now, I insist and ask ?

Re:I beg to differ

[mwvdlee]

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.

Re:I beg to differ

[the eric conspiracy]

> How is this different from what we have now, I insist and ask ?

It's not. Just read Slashdot and you will see plenty of malaise.

Re:I beg to differ

[OglinTatas]

this.

signed, ennui guy.

Re:I beg to differ

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

How is this different from what we have now, I insist and ask ?

Only the rich can afford ennui in america.

Re:I beg to differ

[Marxist Hacker 42]

On the other hand, the global population control regime is only slightly less efficient than he predicted.

Re:I beg to differ

[plebeian]

I would actually go further, and site the prevalence of mood disorders as exactly the type of malaise of the spirit he was predicting.

Re:I beg to differ

[nitehawk214]

Most divergent of all, he believed that increasing automatization of labor would spawn not inequality or joblessness, but spiritual malaise.

How is this different from what we have now, I insist and ask ?

It wasn't caused by automation.

Re:I beg to differ

[plover]

If we accept the premise that we are in a period of "spiritual malaise" (not that I necessarily know how to measure such a thing, or even that I agree we're in such a period), I still wouldn't agree that "automatization of labor" is the cause. A cell phone or a tablet is not a labor saving device as much as it is a communications and information delivery device, and I don't see that a Facebook relationship enhances or detracts from spirituality. Maybe you can't follow your favorite deity on Twitter, but you can sure find and associate with millions of his or her followers quite easily.

Re:I beg to differ

[MozeeToby]

Asimov thought we'd automate everything and everyone would basically have access to everything they really desired. He thought everyone living like kings and never having to work would make everyone a bit depressed and dissatisfied with their lives.

Re:I beg to differ

[TimFenn]

Most divergent of all, he believed that increasing automatization of labor would spawn not inequality or joblessness, but spiritual malaise.

How is this different from what we have now, I insist and ask ?

The 60s were different in that they were one of the few times when there wasn't increasing inequality/joblesness - people married young and could hold on to a job for 50 years - which is the outlier, not the historical norm. Just look at the 19th century by comparison. For a bit more discussion, see here.

Re:I beg to differ

[Stormy Dragon]

Wasn't it? Brooding over existential issues is a pastime largely confined to the better off (it's hard to worry about the meaning of life when you're more worried about getting enough food to eat). It could be argued that by increasing affluence enough that large segments of the population are secure enough to be having these sorts of issues, automation did cause the malaise.

Re:I beg to differ

[PRMan]

Pastors often have their congregation "turn off" all their electronics in order to better hear God. It's a common theme in churches. So the constant filling of our time with noise does contribute to our "spiritual malaise", at least according to many in spiritual jobs.

Re:I beg to differ

[JoeMerchant]

China went to strong population control in 1978, most other non-African countries seem to be achieving a measure of growth reduction without strong direct policies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_control

Re:I beg to differ

[i kan reed]

Keep in mind Asimov was an avowed atheist, and his description of "spiritual malaise" referred more to human nature, and less to going to church.

Re:I beg to differ

[TangoMargarine]

Cite! Not site or sight, cite! Like a citation.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/cite

Re:I beg to differ

[nitehawk214]

Wasn't it? Brooding over existential issues is a pastime largely confined to the better off (it's hard to worry about the meaning of life when you're more worried about getting enough food to eat). It could be argued that by increasing affluence enough that large segments of the population are secure enough to be having these sorts of issues, automation did cause the malaise.

I would have gone with disenfranchisement and economic woes that the rich are insulated from, and the expanding gap between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else.

Re:I beg to differ

[umafuckit]

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.

There is a lot less influence from religion than 50 years ago. Really? In the US we still have Christian extremists trying to smother evolution. Religion currently plays a significant role in US politics, with the Republican party in particular actively courting the conservative Christian vote. Views on abortion have stayed more or less static over the last 40 or 50 years, but at least attitudes to homosexuality are moving in the right direction. We also, of course, have the rise of militant Islam on the world stage. On the plus side, it has become more acceptable to be an atheist. On the minus side, abrasive atheists such as Dawkins are (IMO) not helping things.

Re:I beg to differ

[alexander_686]

But he wasn’t in 1964. That would come latter. I think at this point he was a secular non-practicing Jew. Beyond that nit I think you hit it square on.

Re:I beg to differ

[Anonymous Coward]

If we accept the premise that we are in a period of "spiritual malaise" (not that I necessarily know how to measure such a thing, or even that I agree we're in such a period), I still wouldn't agree that "automatization of labor" is the cause. A cell phone or a tablet is not a labor saving device as much as it is a communications and information delivery device, and I don't see that a Facebook relationship enhances or detracts from spirituality. Maybe you can't follow your favorite deity on Twitter, but you can sure find and associate with millions of his or her followers quite easily.

I really don't think it was meant as a religious or even truly spiritual malaise, maybe more like an existential one, some deep-rooted anxiety in the very core of ourselves.

Gen Y is a good example of this actually. We are stressed out, confused, unmotivated, jaded before our time. We don't know where we come from and we don't know where we're going. Automation has a part to do in this, I think, but it's a pretty small cog in a pretty big machine.

It's uncomfortable, sure, but I'm not convinced it's bad. We're losing faith in the traditional sources of answers, and that's forcing us to find our own meanings in our lives. I think ultimately this will lead to us being better-bloomed in the end, but it'll be a bumpy road.

Re:I beg to differ

[lgw]

China's an odd anomaly. For the most part, people choose to have fewer children the first generation after industrialization (and the concurrent drop in mortality of the young). Population is not leveling out because of central authority, but because technology has reversed the incentives.

Of course, there's a growing and serious problem with demographic implosion in modern and densely populated regions. Just like Universe 25 predicted, the combination of crowding and "malaise" certainly seems to cause us to lose the social ability to reproduce, at least to reproduce above replacement rate.

Re:I beg to differ

[timeOday]

Well, some unemployed dude sitting around getting fat and depressed and playing PS3 all day might well match that definition, especially by 1960s standards.

Re:I beg to differ

[i kan reed]

What he said in his books was that he was essentially since late childhood, but he was pretty scared of admitting it in public. Atheists have made amazing progress in social acceptability since 1980, and a lot of people who hate on "new atheists" don't understand that people feared for their lives and careers, and couldn't talk in public at all.

Re:I beg to differ

[arth1]

Pastors often have their congregation "turn off" all their electronics in order to better hear God.

If the god is so impotent that mere personal electronics can cause him not to be heard, he might not be worth listening to.

If I were to create a god, I'd make him a bit less dependent on what we do and don't.

Re:I beg to differ

[roc97007]

> How is this different from what we have now, I insist and ask ?

It's not. Just read Slashdot and you will see plenty of malaise.

Or watch any reality TV show.

Re:I beg to differ

[roc97007]

How is this different from what we have now, I insist and ask ?

Only the rich can afford ennui in america.

Dunno about that. A friend spent three years on unemployment and freely admitted ennui was his biggest problem. Maybe it's not necessarily an affliction of the rich, but an affliction of the idle, regardless of reason.

Re:I beg to differ

[roc97007]

Asimov thought we'd automate everything and everyone would basically have access to everything they really desired. He thought everyone living like kings and never having to work would make everyone a bit depressed and dissatisfied with their lives.

Compared to 1964, we do, and we are.

Re:I beg to differ

[acroyear]

I'm inclined to agree - "malaise" is an opinion, seen better from the outside than within. Ask any social commentator to look at today's workers or kids, with how much they 'veg' in front of a TV or on a computer, and you definitely know that the work itself, with the rare exception, is not in any way fulfilling.

He was right in that automation doesn't necessarily lead to total unemployment: it changes the jobs, and within a company it reduces them, but on the whole we've more jobs now than we did then (as we have more than twice as many people, but close to the same employment rate as we did then), so the system adapts to unemployment, eventually.

I don't think he was using the term 'spiritually' to in any way imply any aspect of religion, so those that interpret it that way are misreading him.

Re:I beg to differ

[Intron]

Most divergent of all, he believed that increasing automatization of labor would spawn not inequality or joblessness, but spiritual malaise.

How is this different from what we have now, I insist and ask ?

The 60s were different in that they were one of the few times when there wasn't increasing inequality/joblesness - people married young and could hold on to a job for 50 years - which is the outlier, not the historical norm. Just look at the 19th century by comparison. For a bit more discussion, see here.

Having lived through that period, there was a general feeling that we could do anything: stop wars, have civil rights, go to the moon, end poverty by sharing as taught in the bible^W the Whole Earth Catalog. It was a dream, but a pretty good one. Even though the war in Iraq was as unjust and pointless as Vietnam, there was a lot less marching and rock-throwing. People seem to not believe that they can change things. I would call that a malaise.

Re:I beg to differ

[betterprimate]

+5

The premise is that spirituality is not directly coupled with religion or God, but that spirituality (e.g. soul, faith, belief, intuition, love, higher thought) is a fundamental human characteristic that defines our existence (i.e. consciousness).

"Spiritual malaise" would mean a lack of or lessening of human consciousness.

Re:I beg to differ

[tchuladdiass]

Other than the not having to work part, we really do live like kings. We get to sit in a seat to be transported from place to place, our homes are heated and cooled, running hot water, plumbing, non-rancid food, quite a bit of food actually, we can pull up music and other entertainment on demand, and have great libraries at our disposal. The list goes on -- most royalty a couple centuries back didn't have it this good.

Re:I beg to differ

[cusco]

the pricing incentives of Planned Parenthood.

Huh? Planned Parenthood isn't paying anyone not to have kids, so what the frack are you talking about? And the UN? Really?

Re:I beg to differ

[mrbester]

I venture that he thought the automation would result in more people who, while more than intelligent enough for the jobs that are replaced by it, lack the intellectual capacity for thought, insight and philosophy to further the human species that is usually the preserve of high academia. As such we have an increasing population who exist on a diet of "reality" TV and planet-wide self-promotion of irrelevant detail of their lives because they don't know what to do with all this extra free time.

From the viewpoint of someone who doesn't use Facebook, take selfies when pissed, pictures of cats or what I am about to eat (or, worse, an empty plate) for all to "enjoy" it is disheartening.

Re:I beg to differ

[Jherek Carnelian]

Pastors often have their congregation "turn off" all their electronics in order to better hear God. It's a common theme in churches. So the constant filling of our time with noise does contribute to our "spiritual malaise", at least according to many in spiritual jobs.

That's a silly leap of logic. Theaters and symphonies tell people to turn off their phones too, schools forbid them from the classroom and its illegal to text and drive. It isn't about "hearing god" its about paying attention to whatever happen in real life in front of you rather than on the net. There is nothing spiritual about it.

Re:I beg to differ

[laie_techie]

If the god is so impotent that mere personal electronics can cause him not to be heard, he might not be worth listening to.

It's not a matter of God not being heard, but of people not listening or paying attention. My sect has a hymn entitled Know this, that every soul is free. God will not force anyone to heaven, nor will he force anyone to hell; YOU choose where you'll be. Of course, if you can't disconnect for a few minutes a day, you might not be worth having as a follower.

Re:I beg to differ

[khallow]

When meeting people for lunch, this is something I have started to see. Spirituality just isn't there. Usually they care more if you are driving a BMW better than a 3 series than anything cultural, spiritual, or even religious. Materialism is now the biggest religion and spiritual path.

This is a common complaint of spiritualists and theologians through human history. People are inherently materialist and status-seeking. I wager you're either paying more attention to the issue than you used to, or you're moving into a new group of people which happens to be more materialist. But I suppose it could also happen from a break down in society level cooperation.

Of course, mindless materialism can't last. It ends up becoming a petri dish for fascism. The last time we had a global culture similar to this was pre-World War 1, and "The Guns of August" is a good detailing of what can happen... and in the age of the Internet, going from a sleepy materialistic philosophy to armies clashing all around the globe wouldn't be happening in a month, it could happen within days, especially if something happens and a skirmish happens due to disputed islands.

While you're not the first person to make this observation, I think the real similarities are merely that there is a period of peace with considerable infrastructure devoted to preventing large scale wars. In the Pre-First World War period, this was achieved by treaty and large militaries.

In contrast, we don't have the military build up of the First World War. Sure, there's a lot of military build up in the US, but it is both rather frivolous (for example, overpaying service contracts and developing weapon systems that have little use) and not matched by other countries.

As to starting a world war in days, we've had plenty of small conflicts. They didn't magically become big ones.

Re:I beg to differ

[khallow]

In the US we still have Christian extremists trying to smother evolution.

They've been trying since the mid-19th century and they haven't gotten any more effective.

Re:I beg to differ

[khallow]

Wasn't it?

Only if you consider lots of Chinese workers, "automation". This is the main driver for loss of jobs in the developed world. The push towards automation has been due to the developed world's irrational reaction to global labor competition by making their own labor even more expensive.

Re:I beg to differ

[khallow]

He failed to predict that automation would just put people out of work.

Which to state the obvious, was in the right. Automation didn't put people out of work for long. There have always been other jobs to do.

The assumption was that when automation started making physical labor unnecessary that we as a society would work some way of spreading the wealth out. We have, to a limited degree.

Every degree would be limited. Our degree has turned out to be rather ample.

Medicare, Medicaid, and the set of programs that get called "Welfare" wouldn't be possible at their current levels without automation and the profits from greater efficiency, but it's hardly a check in the pocket of every one who would have had a factory job in the past.

None of these are intended to be replacement for labor and wages. So your observation seems quite irrelevant.

However, the pervasive dissatisfaction of those who are employed in menial fluorescent-lit automation related jobs (just about all of us here), as well as the manifest negative effects of depending on a chain of government programs has on people's overall wellbeing, I think "automation will cause malaise" is pretty accurate, even if his underlying economic assumptions were off.

Those "menial" jobs are also well-paying jobs.

Re:I beg to differ

[msobkow]

Nonsense.

It's a common elitist attitude to claim that only the rich have time to think.

It makes it easier to ignore the arguments of the masses by claiming they haven't given the problems any thought.

Re:I beg to differ

[Stormy Dragon]

Oh those elitist psychologists and sociologists:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs

Re:I beg to differ

[Stormy Dragon]

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.

Re:I beg to differ

[deconfliction]

What he said in his books was that he was essentially since late childhood, but he was pretty scared of admitting it in public. Atheists have made amazing progress in social acceptability since 1980, and a lot of people who hate on "new atheists" don't understand that people feared for their lives and careers, and couldn't talk in public at all.

I am a 38 year old christian that was an atheist till about 10 years ago. I would just like to emphasize the above comments. Ironically, popular tolerance of things like non-white-male PoTUS, masturbation, homosexuality, cannabis, and atheism these days (versus the 70s and 80s of my childhood) factor greatly into my worship of God.

Re:I beg to differ

[khallow]

Manufacturing jobs are not going over sees, they're disappearing completely.

Let's look at a source that considers more than just US employment (page 8):

Industrial employment hardest hit

â Total global employment in industry declined slightly in 2009, which is a major divergence from the historical annual growth rate of 3.4 per cent over the period from 2002 to 2007. Employment in agriculture grew in 2009, which also represented a divergence versus historical trends.

Does a growth rate of over 3% annually in manufacture employment sound to you like the jobs are "disappearing completely"?

Re:I beg to differ

[Gavagai80]

Even though the war in Iraq was as unjust and pointless as Vietnam, there was a lot less marching and rock-throwing.

Most people felt no personal investment in Iraq, because it was volunteers and foreigners dying. There was a draft in Vietnam, making it personal to a lot more people who feared being called up, or their loved ones being called up. That's the difference, not society.

Re:I beg to differ

[FrankSchwab]

And I'd say that the war in Iraq had far less of a point than Vietnam. I believe that good people bought into containing the spread of communism, and felt that war was the only way to do so. For Iraq, I've found no narrative that makes sense, other than raw exercise of presidential power in furtherance of corporate interests.

Re:I beg to differ

[dbIII]

Mao wasn't delivering industrialization (he was hampering by it sending the people who could deliver it out into the countryside) so went for the brute force. Just like most of what he did really.

Re:I beg to differ

[deconfliction]

I hope the person who modded me down understood that I was being sincere, and not a troll. If you downmodded me because I forgot to add to the list access to legal contraception and abortion, and great - if incomplete - progress on the gender gap in civil rights, then that is cool.

Re:I beg to differ

[houghi]

Even though the war in Iraq was as unjust and pointless as Vietnam, there was a lot less marching and rock-throwing.

I Liked an anti-war thing on Facebook. Is that not the same?

Re:I beg to differ

[LongearedBat]

I think you meant:

"Spiritual malaise" would mean a lack of or lessening of human conscience.

But yes, I agree.

Re:I beg to differ

[cascadingstylesheet]

Keep in mind Asimov was an avowed atheist, and his description of "spiritual malaise" referred more to human nature, and less to going to church.

Yet he lived in a society that was most definitely recently post-Christian.

He and many other thinkers of the time liked that inheritance, even if they didn't believe it's source. Plenty of thinkers were wondering "how do we keep that, without the beliefs?"

Re:I beg to differ

[Intron]

Ho Chi Minh allied with the communists to try to free his country from the French. It has ultimately turned out to be a successful strategy as Vietnam is free and independent. If we had supported our former ally instead of joining the war against him it would likely now be a democracy. Like Iraq, diplomacy would have been a better course than military action, but there are active hawks in the US government then and now.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. DDE

Re:I beg to differ

[hb253]

Ouch, you wasted time and energy answering a troll...

Re:I beg to differ

[MikeBabcock]

And we also have a huge rise in depression and mental instability in general. Those would be called spiritual malaise to someone of his era.

Re:I beg to differ

[i kan reed]

No, that's not what he meant at all. In context, conscience would be irrelevant.

Re:I beg to differ

[gohmifune]

Just guessing, but maybe the poster means Planned Parenthood provide affordable alternatives to having children?

Re:I beg to differ

[goose-incarnated]

If the god is so impotent that mere personal electronics can cause him not to be heard, he might not be worth listening to.

It's not a matter of God not being heard, but of people not listening or paying attention. My sect has a hymn entitled Know this, that every soul is free. God will not force anyone to heaven, nor will he force anyone to hell; YOU choose where you'll be.

If by "YOU choose where you'll be" you mean "you unwittingly go to hell because you worshipped the wrong god". Anyway, how the hell do you know that you're worshipping the right one? Odds are good that you'll be there in hell with me.

Re:I beg to differ

[cusco]

The spelunker-level bullshit intrigued me. Sometimes you just have to plumb the depth of the well to see how truly deluded people are. I'm hoping for black helicopters spraying chemtrails.

Re:I beg to differ

[Marxist Hacker 42]

$6000 for a live birth at the hospital, $500 for an abortion. And that was *BEFORE* HHS paid Planned Parenthood to develop the Teen Outreach Program, which pays high school students up to $30 each to attend lectures, with a $600 bonus if they get sterilized.

As for the United Nations, it's pretty clear that the whole intent of the World Health Organization branch is to push contraceptives and abortion in the third world.

Re:I beg to differ

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Exactly right. And is willing to pay direct through the TOP program for advertising to certain high school students who have more than the recommended amount of melanin in their skin.

Re:I beg to differ

[cusco]

So much stupid in such a short post. Where do I start?

1) Planned Parenthood developed TOP on its own over 20 years ago. HHS recommends it, because the program works to prevent teen pregnancies and teens fathering children

2) Planned Parenthood does not pay students to attend TOP sessions

3) Planned Parenthood does not pay students to get sterilized

4) I don't know of any state where it costs only $6000 to have a kid at a hospital, even without complications common among teens

5) You do realize that abortion services are
6) The whole intent of WHO is ... what??? Is that an actual belief anywhere? I'd love to see where the logic train derailed on this.

Where in the world does crap disinformation like this get started?

Re:I beg to differ

[betterprimate]

i kan reed already clarified, but I think I could help out a bit more.

Think more of the "human spirit" and all that that entails. A malaise is a lessening of consciousness. Asimov was a writer; his usage of "spiritual" has no religious connotations.

Re:I beg to differ

[cusco]

Huh. Part of 5) disappeared. Should read:

5) You do realize that abortion services are less than 5 percent of the services that Planned Parenthood provides, don't you?

And your predictions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing your gripe at Asimov's article I am very curious... What are your predictions for 2064?
Do you think you can hit as many home runs as Asimov?

Re:And your predictions?

[Mr D from 63]

If I make enough predictions, I'll get some right.

Re:And your predictions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Once someone invents a sexbot, all progress will grind to a halt. As a matter of fact, I think that's why intelligent species never progress to interstellar travel. Once they have the sexbot, they never leave the house.

Re:And your predictions?

[ledow]

It's easy to win on predictions - just make sure your predictions are obvious. Throw in a "robot controlled car" or two to make people think and so you don't get 100% and you're golden. Hence

- People will continue to be stupid.
- There will be wars still.
- Computers will become cheaper, more powerful, more "invisible" and thus more ubiquitous.
- We'll send more stuff out of the atmosphere, and it won't just be the US doing so.
- We'll make advances in personal medicine in (pick any particular area here, say, genetics, or mental health).
- etc. etc. etc.

Read Asimov's predictions: the more specific you are, the less accurate you will be. Multi-flavoured algae is a sci-fi staple, one up from a magic meal-pill. Automated cars? We could have had them back in the 40's, it depends on your definition of automated (hint: When was the first autopilot invented? - go looking for the answer on the BBC TV show "QI"). Video phones? People have been predicting them since before TV existed. World population? Just extrapolate the curve and you won't go far wrong. The rest is all stuff that could easily have happened, we just didn't happen to go in those directions.

The problem with predicting the future isn't in being right. It's in being USEFUL in being right. None of the above predictions are helpful to anyone, even if you could GUARANTEE they would be correct. Which, even Asimov, who had a pretty good grasp of what the future could be, couldn't be better than about 20%.

Re:And your predictions?

[MBGMorden]

Seeing your gripe at Asimov's article I am very curious... What are your predictions for 2064?

The Year of Linux on the Desktop?

Re:And your predictions?

[lgw]

Once someone invents a sexbot, all progress will grind to a halt. As a matter of fact, I think that's why intelligent species never progress to interstellar travel. Once they have the sexbot, they never leave the house.

Nah, that's a brief stumbling block. Eventually most species figure out that you can put a sexbot on a space ship, and interstellar travel is appealing again. That's also why we don't see aliens all over the place - they just have great technology to insure a little privacy when it's most needed.
 

Re:And your predictions?

[fyec]

I think you missed the point of the post. The OP was not griping about how inaccurate Asimov was. The griping is about NPR, Huffington Post, and Business Insider and their lauding of how right Asimov was, when he mostly wasn't.
Asimov was brilliant and certainly did better in these predictions than many could have done, but he got more wrong than right. A headline like "Genius predicted a few things but was mostly wrong" just does not make good copy.

Re:And your predictions?

[doti]

You overestimate sex.

Once you can get it freely and any time you want, it eventually decays into just another thing you do for pleasure, or even just to satisfy another nature's urge.

Re:And your predictions?

[RightSaidFred99]

Bullshit. Make 30 non-trivial predictions, let's see if you get even 10 right.

Asimov was a smart dude, and he did a lot better at predicting 50 years away than most "technologists"/"futurists" would today.

Re:And your predictions?

[imatter]

The sexbot's name? Mr. Prostitute.

Re:And your predictions?

[gander666]

Too soon

Re:And your predictions?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Multi-flavoured algae is a sci-fi staple, one up from a magic meal-pill.

Well, to be honest, algae and yeast food was Asimov's pet peeve of sorts. And I still think that it's not such a bad idea.

Automated cars? We could have had them back in the 40's, it depends on your definition of automated (hint: When was the first autopilot invented? - go looking for the answer on the BBC TV show "QI")

QI? Is that the show where they seriously claimed that Earth had two moons? BTW, have you noticed how simple an autopilot is, compared to self-driving cars? The need for situational awareness for an airplane autopilot is ridiculously low compared to driving.

Re:And your predictions?

[Culture20]

Don't Date Robots!
http://vimeo.com/12915013

Re:And your predictions?

[ThatsDrDangerToYou]

Seeing your gripe at Asimov's article I am very curious... What are your predictions for 2064?

The Year of Linux on the Desktop?

Microsoft will release a crappy OS, but after the patch it will be slightly less crappy.

Re:And your predictions?

[jeffb (2.718)]

Nah, it'll be drouds. Why filter your pleasure through the limited bandwidth and range of your physical senses?

Re:And your predictions?

[TangoMargarine]

Make a high enough volume of predictions and you're guaranteed to get an equal or greater number right. Nobody said anything about success *percentage* :)

Re:And your predictions?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Seeing your gripe at Asimov's article I am very curious... What are your predictions for 2064?

The Year of Linux on the Desktop?

Certainly. But since the invention of seamless human-computer interface brain implants will have relegated desktop computers into the area of retro-computing by 2057, it will still mean that it will only be for geeks.

Re:And your predictions?

[Sperbels]

Asimov was a smart dude, and he did a lot better at predicting 50 years away than most "technologists"/"futurists" would today.

Well, it's rather simple to see the future when you're the founder of psychohistory. Duh.

Re:And your predictions?

[lgw]

Well, we have to test the sexbot firmware upgrades on someone - any volunteers? No? OK then, round up some "volunteers" for testing someplace where no one will complain if they go missing.

Makes sense to me!

Re:And your predictions?

[SolitaryMan]

The problem with predictions like "cordless phone" and "robot cars" is that they are super easy. A lot of people want it, a lot of people dreamed of it, a lot of people ready to pay for it, so there is a high chance that this will happen. The thing you don't know is *when*. Our lives are not run by "cars with brains" in a same way it is run by smart phones, so saying that he predicted correctly both is somewhat of an overstatement.

I'll give you an example of similar prediction: in 50 years all devices will be charged remotely, no need to plug them in. You'll enter your house and the devices you carry with you will start to charge. This is almost bound to happen. When and to what extent -- this is the question that nobody can answer (and the one that really matters.)

Re:And your predictions?

[Capt.Albatross]

Seeing your gripe at Asimov's article I am very curious... What are your predictions for 2064?
Do you think you can hit as many home runs as Asimov?

The OP's main point is not a criticism of Asimov's hit rate, but an observation on the number of commentators who have significantly exaggerated Asimov's prescience.

It is not simply a matter of extracting specific predictions and scoring them yes or no. I think the topics Asimov chose to elaborate on are as interesting as the specific predictions. He has more to say about domestic lighting and appliances than about the human colonization of the moon and the seafloor, which he assumes to be commonplace. In the first paragraph, he alludes to the cold war, which was certainly a big deal in '64, but he is otherwise silent on it. The development of the developing world is similarly ignored, despite that being where most of the population growth that he is rightly concerned about occurs.

Asimov's comments were made in the context of the '64 world's fair, and in part they reflect the technological parochialism of that event. We can see with hindsight that social/political change has been more significant than technical development over the last fifty years, and Asimov is at his best when he addresses the former.

Re:And your predictions?

[Naatach]

In 2064, I bet Nuclear Fusion as our common power source will only be 20 years away.

Re:And your predictions?

[HeckRuler]

We'll hit global peak oil sometime in there. It's not like all the cars will stop running tomarrow. It's more like oil will get so expensive that people start taking the bus, train, bike. You know, like it did in 2007. That squeeze popped the housing bubble, everyone got poor, had to use the bus anyway, and oil prices returned to sane levels. Plus everyone started digging into any sort of oil potential when it was looking like $100/barrel was coming. Yay improperly damped systems. And while the US might have hit peak oil a while ago, global peak oil is certainly a ways out. 50 years sounds optimistic.

If things don't change that could break globalization. It'll be a hard lesson to people that they can buy a shirt for $0.50 cents in Bangladesh, sell it here for $10, and still lose money. But of course things will change. Maybe the slow boats will switch the nuclear. Who knows. Maybe solar powered lighter-than-air hydrogen-based sky truckers will save the day.

The battlefield for the first-world nations will be vastly more automated. A tipping point will come when they want their machines to operate without satellite coverage and a greater degree or autonomy will be introduced. That or mobile connectivity will reign supreme next to air superiority.

Well see a continued gradual improvement in robotics. What they can do NOW is amazing. Give it 50 years and I imagine they'll be novelty competitors in the Olympics. Even in 50 years, it won't be cost effective to have a personal android maid. That's called a roomba. It doesn't do windows.

More and more jobs will be automated. Like factory jobs, then clerical jobs, the office worker and low-end technical jobs will fade. Like how we no longer have mail rooms at the office, we will no longer have HR departments. Problem with your paycheck? log in and fill out the complaint form.

China will suffer setbacks and undergo more change. Everyone knows China is coming online and turning into a super-power. But I think they'll have to go through some growing pains before they rival the USA. They'll develop a middle class. They'll clean up their factory lands. They'll have to decide what "legal" actually means. India is lagging behind China but will have the opportunity to during these stumbles. Europe will continue to consolidate into a single power. Africa will still be a clusterfuck.

Like how we dealt with black's rights, and women's right and are now dealing with gay's rights, I see we'll deal with the rights of artificial beings. AI's in university servers. They'll break that Turing test in the court room and we'll see how it goes. Mostly though, AI and computers will be still be tools. Google's overmind might know more about you than you do and have the omniscience of a god, but it won't have any over-arcing goals other than fetching you pictures of cats on the Internet.

We'll have to deal with our bodies and DNA being open to public scrutiny to anyone with a buck. Hello GATAGA.

People will still be greedy selfish assholes most of the time, but the exceptions will make it all worth it.

Re:And your predictions?

[Intron]

The problem with predictions like "cordless phone" and "robot cars" is that they are super easy. A lot of people want it, a lot of people dreamed of it, a lot of people ready to pay for it, so there is a high chance that this will happen. The thing you don't know is *when*. Our lives are not run by "cars with brains" in a same way it is run by smart phones, so saying that he predicted correctly both is somewhat of an overstatement.

I'll give you an example of similar prediction: in 50 years all devices will be charged remotely, no need to plug them in. You'll enter your house and the devices you carry with you will start to charge. This is almost bound to happen. When and to what extent -- this is the question that nobody can answer (and the one that really matters.)

Your predictions are absurd. In 50 years you won't be carrying devices, they will be embedded in your body or ubiquitous in your environment. You are looking at short term issues with present day devices.. Asimov had a 10-pound dial telephone and predicted that in 50 years we would be carrying it around and reading documents on it. Which prediction is better?

Re:And your predictions?

[gbjbaanb]

yet we still don't have flying cars, and everyone wants one of those!

Its easy to consider cordless phones as super easy after they've been invented. The idea that someone would put the necessary infrastructure everywhere to enable such things.... crazy talk. Ubiquitous mobile phones were the stuff of sci-fi only 25 years ago (yes, I know we still had radio telecoms before then, but they weren't quite the same thing as universal phone service)

Predicting remote charging - that's not a prediction, that's something that almost happens today (ie could if you bought the right kit. Its false to predict "smart homes" appearing because Bill Gates already has one - its not much of a prediction). Try again, this time with something that we don't have today.

Re:And your predictions?

[gbjbaanb]

as always, you forget the social aspect - while we could make a sexbot, its far cheaper and easier just to use eastern european and asian girls.

Just like its easier and cheaper to use immigrant workers for things that robots could do. Maybe if we stopped the psychopaths from getting in charge, we could change this, but I doubt they'll let us.

Re:And your predictions?

[mrbester]

*cough* Nostradamus *cough*

Re:And your predictions?

[fnj]

have you noticed how simple an autopilot is, compared to self-driving cars? The need for situational awareness for an airplane autopilot is ridiculously low compared to driving.

I'm not so sure about situational awareness. There a lot of things that airplane pilots, auto and human, have to worry about which are much simpler or don't exist for cars. There are 3 translational plus 3 rotational degrees of freedom rather than 1 plus 1. For example, a car pilot has simply no concern whatsoever about pitch, and short of avoiding a rollover due to some outrageously improper maneuver, no concern about roll. There is no worry that the car can enter a three dimensional spin. The car can stop dead at any time, anywhere, without any thought of falling out of the sky. To avoid collisions, in a plane, someone or something has to scan 360 degrees on 3 axes. In a car, someone or something only has to scan 360 degrees on 1 axis. No matter how limited the visibility, the car is not apt to assume an upside down attitude combined with an accelerative vector such that no human or accelerometer can tell the difference from upright level progress.

Sure, there are factors that work the other way. The most significant one is that the car is on a designated roadway. Someone or something has to possess the ability to keep on the correct track as the roadway turns at random; other vehicles make their own decisions leading to their own, perhaps conflicting, maneuvers; lanes start and stop and change width; various maneuvers in various places are explicitly enjoined ("no left turn"; "no right on red") or demanded either all the time ("stop") or from time to time (traffic lights, cops in road directing traffic). Questions arise which need to be answered quickly regarding objects appeaing on the roadway. Is it alive (can it move unexpectedly)? Is it human? Does it represent a hazard to the structure of the car, or is it harmless to me?

Also, air is air, but roadways are subject to various degradations. Lane markers wear toward invisibility, there are potholes, there are foreign objects scattered in the roadway (worst case: "beware falling rocks"), the edge of the roadway can crumble, the whole roadway can wash out or become inundated by flood water.

So yes, there are significant factors making it vastly more difficult to design a system to ensure safe progress on a roadway than in flight. I wouldn't necessarily call it a need for a higher degree of situational awareness. I would call it a profusion of additional factors, many of them requiring very complex sensing and dealing.

Re:And your predictions?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

An airplane can easily navigate within its corridor using a GPS, INS, and the assortment of traditional instruments just fine, using what amount to a few comparatively simple equations. The air traffic control gives you directions as to where you can fly and where you can't, as it does in case of all the other airplanes in controlled airspace, so you don't have to worry that you'll bump into someone (you effectively can't check on that anyway, you don't have the instruments for that). Dozens or sometimes even hundreds of meters (admittedly, more horizontally than vertically) don't matter. A car, OTOH, has to deal with roads, buildings, and other cars, in a matter of fractions of second and dozens of centimeters. That *doesn't* get easily reduced to a few equations, but rather to CV, 3-D scene reconstruction, and a hefty portion of artificial intelligence. *That* is what I had in mind when I was talking of situational awareness.

Re:And your predictions?

[Em Adespoton]

Seeing your gripe at Asimov's article I am very curious... What are your predictions for 2064?

The Year of Linux on the Desktop?

Nah; Microsoft will have been acquired by Taco Bell by that time... which will then have split up to become a bunch of Baby Bells. One of those Baby Bells will rename itself Microsoft, and split off to only handle the multi-flavoured algae part of the industry, consuming their only competitor, Algae Tastes & Technologies. Their most popular menu item will be the Zune, available in regular, large, and X-Box.

Re:And your predictions?

[Em Adespoton]

Seeing your gripe at Asimov's article I am very curious... What are your predictions for 2064?

The Year of Linux on the Desktop?

Certainly. But since the invention of seamless human-computer interface brain implants will have relegated desktop computers into the area of retro-computing by 2057, it will still mean that it will only be for geeks.

Will Netcraft be dead yet?

Re:And your predictions?

[SolitaryMan]

First, I can almost guarantee you that in 50 years we will still have devices we would need to carry: I didn't say "phones", I said "devices". Second, devices embedded in your body still need power. Third, Asimov's original article didn't say anything about "carrying phone around", only that the telephone will have screen. Fourth, the "short term issue with present day devices" has been around for decades, literally.

Regarding which prediction is better -- only time will tell.

Re:And your predictions?

[SolitaryMan]

yet we still don't have flying cars, and everyone wants one of those!

... and yet Asimov predicted that we would!

My point was not that I can predict better then Asimov. I didn't try. I wrote the first thing that came to mind. The point is that for many changes it is a lot harder to predict a time line, rather than will it or will it not happen. The remote charging is exactly one of those technologies that is "almost happening" for several decades now. Same goes for the flying car.

BTW, Asimov did not actually say anything about cordless phones. I read his predictions after posting my original comment.

Re:And your predictions?

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

The sexbot's name? Mr. Prostitute.

Movie ref by any chance? Haven't seen that one in a while. "Us Yellowbeards are never more dangerous than when we're dead!"

Re:And your predictions?

[kaatochacha]

But all OSs are Taco Bell!

Biggest oops

[blogan]

He keeps thinking there will be a 2014 World's Fair.

Re:Biggest oops

[Anonymous Coward]

After having seen a documentary on the Chicago' Columbian Exposition a while back, I wondered why we don't have World's Fairs anymore.

Turns out, we still do. The most recent one was in 2012 in South Korea, the next one will be in 2015 in Milan. (They're called "Expo"s now, rather than "World's Fairs".) The US hasn't had one since the boondoggle that was the 1984 New Orleans World's Fair, though.

Re:Biggest oops

[ahaweb]

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

Re:Biggest oops

[blogan]

So, not in 2014? Noted. :)

Only Art

[Anonymous Coward]

At one point in predicting the robotic future in one essay in his magazine, Asimov said that if there was no work, all that people would have left to do was develop entertainment. Reminds me of Robert Noyse believing that the only use for a computer in the home was for recipes in the kitchen. Of course, Ben Franklin could think of no real use for electricity either.

Re:Only Art

[jedidiah]

Don't be so dismissive of recipes.

The 2nd thing that the printing press was used for was recipes.

This post is incredibly biased.

[Anonymous Coward]

>Most divergent of all, he believed that increasing automatization of labor would spawn not inequality or joblessness, but spiritual malaise.

Lol what? Automatization is to blame? What sort retard actually believes this? SURELY it's not god-awful policies, allowing corporations and banks to get out of control, or any of that sort of "serious" business. It's OBVIOUSLY improvements of our working conditions and the ability to produce more.

Re:This post is incredibly biased.

[omnichad]

The same sort that would make up the word automatization instead of just saying automation.

Re:This post is incredibly biased.

[TangoMargarine]

If the human worker is replaced by machines and finds him/herself lacking something constructive to do, it seems natural to think that they may end up questioning the meaning of their life. Societal improvements in working conditions and ability to produce more are beside the point if the person in question doesn't have a job.

Re:This post is incredibly biased.

[lgw]

Almost no one is left today with a job as a farmer, soldier, or manufacturing worker - the trio that everyone thought of as "workers" in the late 19th century. But most of us have jobs. There will always be "something constructive to do", and automating away the last few manufacturing jobs won't affect that.

Re:This post is incredibly biased.

[kaatochacha]

I disagree.
I think we are currently going through a revolutionary change, being fueled by automation, and we need to learn how to deal with it.
What will a non-creative 95 point IQ person do if there are no longer any manufacturing/lower end jobs that have been automated away?

Not bad

[BringsApples]

From one of TFAs:

... mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.

But what he failed to grasp was that the mindset of people in general changes. So if we're all bored, all we'll do is invent shit like facebook, and call it 'an integrated part of our society'. But he knew that 'passing time' isn't just some thing to do. This guy was a genius to conclude that robots would be doing a lot of the labor that men used to do, and since the people would be so great in numbers, they'd get bored to such an extent that would cause them mental repercussions. This is beyond what anyone would have been able to experience up to the 60's, in my opinion.

Re:Not bad

[TangoMargarine]

'Integrated' or 'integral'?

Re:Not bad

[BringsApples]

Uhh...
Integrated: verb
To make into a whole by bringing all parts together; unify.

Integral: adjective
necessary to make a whole complete; essential or fundamental.

Re:Not bad

[TangoMargarine]

Yes, exactly. I don't think anyone would argue that facebook is integrated into society; many would argue that facebook is not integral to society.

Re:Not bad

[BringsApples]

Isaac Asimov's insight was an integral part of his being, that he integrated into his 'guessing' method. I really don't understand why his estimate(s) concerning the future are now being doubted. Although we have not gone as far as he predicted (colonizing the moon, etc...) he was spot on regarding man's integration of technology into culture, and why.

Re:Not bad

[ultranova]

But what he failed to grasp was that the mindset of people in general changes.

No, it doesn't. Plato the philosopher dreamed of an utopia ruled by philosopher kings, while thousands of years later Asimov the writer thinks "creative types" - such as writers - will be the true elite of mankind.

This guy was a genius to conclude that robots would be doing a lot of the labor that men used to do, and since the people would be so great in numbers, they'd get bored to such an extent that would cause them mental repercussions. This is beyond what anyone would have been able to experience up to the 60's, in my opinion.

"Idle hands are the devil's tools" -St. Jerome, around 400 AD.

His Smartphone prediction was incredible but...

[JoeyRox]

he failed to predict they would have rounded corners, which everyone knows is the true genius of the smartphone.

Re:His Smartphone prediction was incredible but...

[OzPeter]

he failed to predict they would have rounded corners, which everyone knows is the true genius of the smartphone.

He actually wanted to say they had rounded corners - but his lawyers advised him against that. It was something to do about a time travel machine, a patent application and being sued or some such.

Re:His Smartphone prediction was incredible but...

[CauseBy]

Yeah, that loser Asimov probably thought they would have buttons. What a stooge.

He's no Hari Seldon

[rossdee]

But most SF authors also predicted a future of humanoid robots.

More hits than misses

[ScienceMan]

Considering the trends when he was writing, and which of these were easy projections compared to tough predictions, I'd say the Good Doctor got much more right than wrong in this article. You were expecting may be 100% You've been reading too much Buzzfeed...

The tech boom is micro, not macro

[GodfatherofSoul]

It seems like most sci-fi predictions were based on the big ticket items when the real marvels are in nano technology. Of course, most writers/theorists probably didn't foresee a surge in the "ownership society" attitude of citizenry.

I wouldn't say he was wrong

[pesho]

To me it seems he was too optimistic. He got the technology part pretty well. What he underestimated was the dickishness of the average human:

• 1. Global governance: why not, we badly needed. The only problem is that people on any given spot of the world think the guys across the border are out to get them.
• 2. Base on the moon. No problem from technical standpoint, but then again who is going to spend money on that when a war makes for a better photo-op and comes handy during elections.
• 3. Distributing fairly the productivity gains from automation. Yeah right! You are fired, go flip burgers. Oh and by the way you have to know that flipping burgers is not a carrier, so we are going to pay you less than it would cost us to put a robot there. You see we are doing you good here by providing a stimulus for you to achieve your dreams.

Re:I wouldn't say he was wrong

[jedidiah]

Even the areas where he was kind of right also touched on things that aren't really all that different between then and now. On the one hand, his idea of automated meals didn't quite pan out but they already had TV dinners back then anyways.

Plus there is still this annoying air gap between the freezer and the stove and ZERO inter-device integration.

Even if I wanted a TV dinner warm and ready when I step into the house, there would still be that air gap and integration problem.

Re:I wouldn't say he was wrong

[david_thornley]

I disagree on the Moonbase; it is a big problem from a technical standpoint. It would have to have regular and fairly massive deliveries from Earth to survive, and the simple fact is that space flight never became anywhere near as cheap as SF authors predicted (partly because space travel was vital to their stories). It turned out to be a much harder problem than expected.

Re:I wouldn't say he was wrong

[deconfliction]

1. Global governance: why not, we badly needed. The only problem is that people on any given spot of the world think the guys across the border are out to get them.

methinks you undersell the problem of language and cultural differences. If we see universal translator technology go much closer to star-trek levels than the reality of recent decades (despite the hype) I think a global democracy will become much more possible

Re:I wouldn't say he was wrong

[marcosdumay]

The only problem is that people on any given spot of the world think the guys across the border are out to get them.

Well, that's because they are. As also are the ones within borders.

About distribution, that only works if you don't do it too much. Make enough people have nothing to lose, and they'll make the next rational step.

Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

The current result of automated labor is spiritual malaise... Because that's an inexorable product of it having brought radical inequality and joblessness since our culture bases one's personal value upon one's wealth.

We do have algae in our beverages, China did undertake a massive population control regime, and I'm not sure what you'd called TV dinners if not "machine-created meals". Granted, they aren't personalized and prepared on the spot as he might perhaps have envisioned, but I'm more than willing to grant him a correct prediction there because we've heard of robotic burger joints lately.

As for the colony on the moon, that is easily within our capability, but the political will is not there. And that's merely a matter of the caprice of our lawmakers. Besides, Mars One is well underway, and we are eyeballing asteroid mining. Give it only a few more eyeblinks in the grand timeline of things and it's quite likely that we'll be there.

I'm willing to grant him a margin of error the same as I'm willing to grant a margin of error to all calculations, observations and predictions.

It's a bit asinine anyway as Asimov never claimed to have clairvoyance anyway. These "predictions" were just whimsical entertainment in the first goddamn place, so I have no idea why people are intensely interested in the rightness or wrongness of it all.

All that diveregent? Really?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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.

Too late to burn him as a false prophet?

[gewalker]

Deu 18:20-22

But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.'
And if you say in your heart, 'How may we know the word that the LORD has not spoken?'--
when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.

Being dead has not prevent exhuming the body and "punishing it" in the past. And to be honest, I don't recall anywhere the Bible calls for burning false prophets in the general case (though there are examples of putting them to death)

Of course Asimov never claimed to be a prophet, just a prognosticator. Jean Dixon on the other hand ...

Re:Too late to burn him as a false prophet?

[PRMan]

He never claimed to speak in the name of God. He just made good predictions about where technology would take us.

"eating at multi-flavored algae bars"

[Culture20]

I eat at Taco Bell semi-regularly.

Re:"eating at multi-flavored algae bars"

[thegarbz]

When I went to the states a few years back I actually had to go to a Taco Bell. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

Lets just say it was exactly as described. None of what I received resembled food by sight taste or smell, and even the cheese sauce looks like it would be edible by someone with a serious dairy allergy.

I ate about half of it and threw it in the bin trying very hard not to throw the bits I've already eaten into the bin too. You do algae a great disservice, algae tastes better than this.

Re:"eating at multi-flavored algae bars"

[avandesande]

I heard they were only 30% algae....

Algae Bars

[russotto]

I'm pretty sure they sell the multi-flavored algae bars at Whole Foods.

multi-flavored algae bars

[OrangeTide]

Ever been to Whole Foods?

Tofu, Quinoa, Quorn, Seitan, Tempeh, ...
 

Re:multi-flavored algae bars

[umafuckit]

Ever been to Whole Foods?

Tofu, Quinoa, Quorn, Seitan, Tempeh, ...

Those aren't algal products, most of them are far from new, none of them are eaten as "bars" (although some forms of Tofu are sliced and eaten on their own). Tofu is a soy product and has existed for thousands of years. Seitan has existed for about 50 years and is a wheat product. Quinoa is a grain. Quorn is modern and based on mycoprotein. Tempeh is a 200 year old soy product.

Re:multi-flavored algae bars

[Mister_Stoopid]

Those are all grains, not algae. Algae would be much healthier than all that Whole Foods crap.

Re:multi-flavored algae bars

[OrangeTide]

you never been to whole foods? they have a hot deli bar and salad bar.

Re:multi-flavored algae bars

[OrangeTide]

quorn is not a grain, it's a fungus!

And I'm not sure why people have to be so literal when it comes to the predictions of a futurist. A selection of food protein derived from non-animal sources, generally processed heavily to provide it with a meat like texture. If you were in the 1960s you would probably assume algae was the future. But the core idea is about taking something that isn't meat and turning it into a trendy meat substitute.

Am I the only one who prefers Soylent Red over Soylent Green ?

Re:Future?

[jeffb (2.718)]

I think that's more commonly attributed to Ray Bradbury. I don't actually consider Bradbury a science-fiction writer, but mine is apparently a minority view.

Re:Borderline Communist

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

...they are about communist societies. No money, but everyone has a job and is given what is needed to survive...

So, just like the Star Trek universe then?

I predict the future

[Charliemopps]

In the future we will have more of the things we want, and less of the annoyances we don't want... due to technology. I'm a visionary! Oh wait, that's common sense.

grits, plasma, what's the difference?!

[Thud457]

Asimov was right, nanotechnology is sexxy!
Move over Natalie : Raquel Welch, tiny and miniaturized, in a skin-tight diving suit.
Fantastic!

Why so negative?

[OblongPlatypus]

Sure, "spot on" is obviously stretching it, but considering the time scale I think he did really well - I doubt anyone today would be able to predict 2064 equally well. Some good examples from the original article:

State of robotics: "Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence."

State of space exploration: "By 2014, only unmanned ships will have landed on Mars, though a manned expedition will be in the works."

Smartphones: "Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books."

Fiberoptics for data transmission: "Laser beams will have to be led through plastic pipes, to avoid material and atmospheric interference."

Flatscreens: "As for television, wall screens will have replaced the ordinary set."

Slightly too optimistic on the proliferation of programming skills, but remarkable considering the state of computers in 1964: "All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary "Fortran""

Re:Why so negative?

[Stargoat]

Meh. This is not too far off. We do not teach much proper mathematics in schools any longer, but rather we instruct students in how to manipulate computers.

While I agree that the instruction in computer manipulation should be superior, I would suggest that this indicative of the overall decline of the American academic system rather than an oversight of education.

Re:Why so negative?

[djmurdoch]

Fiberoptics for data transmission: "Laser beams will have to be led through plastic pipes, to avoid material and atmospheric interference."

What a fraud. Fiberoptics use glass, not plastic.

Re:Why so negative?

[complete loony]

Yeah, he underestimated the impact of well designed UI's. Most people don't need to know how computers actually work in order to use software written by other people.

Spiritual Malaise is the definition of Depression

[kahili]

Third world countries don't have Depression or Diabetes in remotely the numbers that we do because they are busy fighting Malaria and Tuberculosis and sometimes starvation. In fact that's the least divergent prediction.

Spritual Malaise is exactly where we are

[Gothmolly]

If "spiritual malaise" doesn't describe 21st century America, then I don't know what does.

Re:Spritual Malaise is exactly where we are

[Camel Pilot]

What is Spiritual Malaise to you?

Re:Spritual Malaise is exactly where we are

[ultranova]

People spending huge swaths of their leisure time playing games where they go to strip clubs and kill hookers.

Sure sounds like fucking Spiritual Malaise to me.

But it's not. It's simply people doing the same thing they've always done, but using less resources and bothering less bystanders while doing so. The very fact that you consider people playing cops and robbers a sign of spiritual malaise means you're living in such utopian times you've lost all sense of perspective.

Spiritual Malaise?

[Camel Pilot]

What exactly is spiritual malaise? Not a very precise term. To a fundamentalist Theist it might mean not accepting [insert humanlike god] as your personal Lord and Savior to another it might mean not accepting a human invented god to another it might mean not being materialistic.

Spiritual Malaise is a humpty dumpty phrase.

Re:Spiritual Malaise?

[Camel Pilot]

OK I rtfa

mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine - Asimov

I think he is wrong as tools and automation do not limit the ability to do creative work but open up new ways of being creative. If not having tools enhance ones happiness and well being then the stone age would have been the most spiritual era of mankind.

Re:Spiritual Malaise?

[trenobus]

I'm not going to try to define it, but if you want to measure it, the suicide rate should be well-correlated. I looked for some statistics that would go back to 1964, and didn't immediately find any (though I'm sure they're out there). But the rate has spiked lately, even surpassing auto accident fatalities.

RTFA

[WOOFYGOOFY]

I disagree. If you read RTFAs that cover this topic, he was clearly very prescient. His Big Mistake was to consider that the people who Run The Show would have any interest in elevating humanity so as to achieve Asimov's own egalitarian vision of universal equality wrt to material well being, leisure time and general wealth. Given when he wrote , this was universally just accepted as The Goal of Society.

We now know better. We now understand that males will attempt to create and sustain as much of a material differential as they possibly can between themselves and other males for the purpose of creating, in the minds of fertile females, a perception of being "better" than other males.

This is, at core, what drives inequality. It's sexual competition where "fitness" is measured, as it is in every other species, as the ability to control resources OVER AND ABOVE the amount of resources the average specimen controls. This is what "being attractive" amounts to, for males, or at least that part of "being attractive" which is under their control so far.

So Asimov's thinking just wasn't well informed on this matter the way it was on technical matters. That's hardly to his discredit.

Re:RTFA

[lgw]

Very poor post, gets an "F".

While you do of course blame Males, and blame The Rich, you're don't even try to blame Christians nor Whitey/Colonialism for anything, and only partially and vaguely blame people who can't accept gays. 2.5 out of 5 points. Try harder, or you'll never pass this class.

For extra credit next time, also be sure to use the word "bullies" to describe those with heteronormative expectations, and do try to use the word "privilege" at least once in every post.

Re:RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

So how come some random musicians, who get paid next to nothing, "get all the bitches" while me and my engineer coworkers don't???

Re:RTFA

[WOOFYGOOFY]

yeah but you forgot the disclaimer that lwg and views WOOFY GOOFY as a longstanding enemy and you go after every pot of mine you can find. Just full disclosure, that's all we're asking for lgw

Re:RTFA

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Fame is a form that males can assume that makes them "better" than other males. This, and you and your engineering buddies aren't "rich", you're just average doing OK relatively speaking

Re:RTFA

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Fame it has to be said is also a promise of future wealth.

Even if a groupie hooks up with a rock star for a night then goes back to her life with no expectation of benefiting at any future time, it's STILL a case of genetically driven preference for men with money and power .

Why? Because back when sexual selection was evolving, merely screwing the most powerful male WAS a ticket to preferential treatment for you and your offspring. The powerful male will calculate (unconsciously) that groupie's baby COULD be his and accord its mother and it , the bearer of his genes, preferential treatment. More food from the kill. More protection from adversaries. More favorable social-political judgments from the group. These are the things a one night stand can bring a female who finds men who control resources and other men extremely attractive.

A man who stands up on stage and displays his sexuality with shows of power and expression to the adulation of other men is SOMETHING women pattern match at the genetic level. There is no substitute for power for women.

It's what Joey Ramone once said- "If we weren't The Ramones, we wouldn't even HAVE girlfriends." All rock stars more or less cop to this. Led Zeppelin started as a way to get chicks, or so says Robert Plant. Girls swooon and freak out over the male rock star in a way that is just alien to men. No guys freak out over Brittney Spears or Miley Cyrus. They'd do her. But they'd do her if they saw her in a bar too. That's all the sexual cache a female rock star gets for her trouble.

For most species, the male is the more magnificent site. Peacocks, lions and weird birds that live at the top of trees in the rain forest and have huge globular translucent bright-red ball-sack like things under their throat that when they puff them up with air causes them to nearly double in size and which is used as. basis by the female of the same species as a criteria for copulatory rights using the unbeatable rule : "the bigger, the better".

Why? Because chicks get of on huge globular translucent bright-red ball-sack like things that can be puffed up with air to huge proportions. Why? Because.

Re:RTFA

[lgw]

How can I be a longstanding enemy of a 7-digit UID? Anyhow, I don't recall seeing your username before yesterday, and it's a bit distinctive.

Not that inaccurate.

[wcrowe]

I don't know about Asimov being that inaccurate. Keep in mind that a lot of what he is describing are exhibits at the 2014 World's fair. These would still be futuristic things even in 2014, but technologically possible. Many of the things he describes are devices or systems that are technically possible, but still not quite reasonable from an economic perspective. Obviously he is way off on some things, but that just goes to show how difficult it is to predict future developments.

Re:Not that inaccurate.

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

  - Commonly Attributed to Niehls Bohr

Re:Not that inaccurate.

[dkf]

Obviously he is way off on some things, but that just goes to show how difficult it is to predict future developments.

Of course. Prediction is known to be difficult, especially about the future.

He should have been right.

[Forty Two Tenfold]

He should have been right. He underestimated human stupidity which dictated that manufacturing destruction is more important than discovery. Compare the DO"D" budget to that of NASA.

The other way around

[allcoolnameswheretak]

It's not Asimov who was wrong. It's reality that has failed to catch up to Asimovs' predictions. We really should have a moon base, tight population control and algae foodstuffs by now.

Re:The other way around

[__aagmrb7289]

Mmm... do@@$#algae...

details misunderstood

[roc97007]

I wonder if the predictions were merely misunderstood. For instance:

"colonies on the moon"

I submit we had the technology to sustain a colony on the moon as early as the late sixties; we simply didn't have the will or the funding. The original article mentions a vehicle "with large soft tires intended to negotiate the uneven terrain" on the moon. There have been several on the moon since 1964. There's one chugging around there now.

I think of the technological predictions he arguably got wrong, most of them could be accomplished with current technology, but were simply not practical or did not catch on.

For instance, practical videophones have been available for some time -- every cell phone with a front facing camera is capable -- but most people don't use the feature, for the same reason videophones didn't catch on in the eighties and nineties. And again didn't catch on at home now that we have broadband to the last mile. It's a social thing, rather than a technological thing -- people don't necessarily want to be looked at when they're making a call.

In summary, of the parts he arguably got wrong, the reasons tend to be social rather than technical.

Re:details misunderstood

[david_thornley]

His phone description describes my iPhone nicely, although I rarely use the video phone capability. (Robot cars were a touch premature, but just a touch.)

As far as the Moonbase is concerned, there seems to have been a distinct lack of thinking what the places would be good for in sixties science fiction, or, alternately, great optimism in how easy spaceflight was going to be. I'm calling that a technological prediction failure.

Re:details misunderstood

[roc97007]

His phone description describes my iPhone nicely, although I rarely use the video phone capability. (Robot cars were a touch premature, but just a touch.)

As far as the Moonbase is concerned, there seems to have been a distinct lack of thinking what the places would be good for in sixties science fiction, or, alternately, great optimism in how easy spaceflight was going to be. I'm calling that a technological prediction failure.

You may be right on the technical side in that most scifi authors had us using a much more efficient/powerful fuel than RP-1/LOX (usually abbreviated to "atomic powered" or some such) but I submit that with Saturn 5 - level technology we could have had a colony on the moon, and that it would have only gotten easier as new materials and new technologies were developed. I think it's more true that we didn't really have a good enough reason to be there. Which, I submit is at least partly sociological.

Now that there's an interest in Hydrogen 3 mining, there might someday be a real reason to go back. But I think first we need practical fusion reactors, and that's been 50 years in our future since Asimov wrote the article.

Re:details misunderstood

[david_thornley]

There was a lot of enthusiasm for nuclear power for everything at the time, but I'm not sure I saw a good design for a nuclear drive for getting off-planet. (Project Orion was not a good idea for lift-off.)

The Saturn 5 was a very expensive piece of equipment, and it managed to deliver three people and a reasonable amount of gear (including a lander) to lunar orbit. To create a functioning moonbase, we probably would have needed hundreds of the things. I don't think that was going to happen. Basically, we need a heavy launch vehicle that's a whole lot cheaper than what we've got now, and I think we're going to need a breakthrough or three to make it practical.

something to keep in mind...

[roc97007]

2014 has just started.

algae bars

[roc97007]

In a way, the "algae bar" prediction did come true.

Global Population Control Regime

[Suiggy]

What are video games?
What is rampant feminism, 70% divorce rates, single mothers?
What is LGBTQIWTFBBQ propaganda in grade schools normalizing homosexual relationships?
What is Planned Parenthood?

All things which lower birth rates, but pass themselves off as something else.

The Will of the Machine Cannot Be Denied!

[ikhider]

I thought 2014 was going to be more like Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, "when man fought machine, and machine won". Wait, they already won. We carry tem around everywhere, feed them electricity, RAM, and processing power, and dedicate almost all our waking hours to them. Machines do not need to hunt down and 'digitize' us. We come to them. Much more effcient.

A much different reaction to other predictions

[Headw1nd]

This seems on the balance to be much less accurate than the "Ladies' Home Journal" 100 year predictions we were talking about a few years back, and I recall those being kind of ridiculed. I suppose it's all a matter of authorial intent: do we want to play up the predictor as a visionary or play down the foresight of our ancestors to assuage our insecurity?

Summary is wrong

[goombah99]

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.

Re:Summary is wrong

[complete loony]

Automated custom meal preparation robots

Go to your local supermarket and really look around. How much of the foods you see purchase there were made exclusively by human hands?

There is a huge amount of automation in the food industry. It just scales better further up the supply chain.

Re:Summary is wrong

[Tablizer]

Generally the increased automation we see is not of the Rosey the Robot (Jetsons) style, but embedded and back-end automation and semi-AI that incrementally improves. Automation and AI are sneaking in the back door such that they are not so visible to the everyday person in the way most futurists predicted, even though they seem to be having some of the impacts they predicted, such as joblessness.

Re:Summary is wrong

[martin-boundary]

The colony on the moon was actually a pretty good prediction. NASA was well on its way to achieve this, when funding was cut and priorities were changed for purely political reasons. And it's not even like NASA's mission was that expensive, compared to the trillions in defense spending that just end up being blown up (literally: a bomb is a way of blowing up the money that built it).

Re:Summary is wrong

[argStyopa]

Until the endpoint service drones start demanding absurd wages like $15/hour and benefits for skill-less menial jobs...in which case I suspect the value proposition for the capital investment of machines at the point of sale becomes much more attractive. I suspect we will see such machines in widespread use in flagship chains within 10 years.

Re:Summary is wrong

[complete loony]

"Self-checkout" point of sale systems already exist, and are being used by most supermarket chains here in Australia.

Re:Summary is wrong

[marcosdumay]

That's because robots are not safe, so we keep them in huge boxes, separated from humans.

In 2013 there was massive improvement on that area, and people are already starting to mix robots and humans on factories. Ater that, mixing them at home requires only time and bug-fixing. I gess he was only a bit early with that prediction.

Re: Summary is wrong

[gzuckier]

Heck, I don't think anybody back then predicted that we'd be using what would at that time have been supercomputers just as wristwatches, and magazines would be giving them away with subscriptions. And still not selling enough subscriptions.

Re: Summary is wrong

[gzuckier]

Oh, there was a moral panic about a year ago; Haaretz (I think it was) broke a story basically stating that like 30 Ethiopian Jewish immigrant women reported that they had been told by the doctors doing their immigration physicals that they needed a Depo-Provera contraceptive shot before they could get an immigrant visa. Of course that hit the news as "Forced Sterilization by Zionazis!!!" (Depo-Provera shots only last like 3 months, not what you'd usually call sterilization). Of course the government denied all knowledge, announced an investigation, etc. They also sent out a memo to all doctors saying nobody should be getting administered any drugs without informed consent, and of course that was taken as evidence that confirmed the original story. I haven't heard what the final verdict on the investigation was, if it's done yet.

No, we was right

[fustakrakich]

We are living under a global population control regime. It's called world finance. The borders are only there to push up the profit margins.

Really?

[King_TJ]

Global governance is "badly needed"? Please feel free to argue your assertion, but I'm going to challenge it. (I suspect your reasoning is going to be along the line of thought that since we're "all on this planet together", we need to be more aware of our natural resources and conservation of wildlife, and other such things which "can affect the rest of the world, not just our nation"?) I'd say that throughout the entire history of mankind, we've NEVER agreed to one global set of rules, and yet we're still here - not only still existing but thriving. If global governance was so important, the lack of it for so long should have done us in!

People in "any given spot of the world" thinking the people across the border are out to get them won't change, just because you add another layer of governance to everything we've already put in place! What we have is a lot of variety. Different nations run things in different ways and some do better than others. I agree that it might not be "fair" for a baby to be born in into a corrupt dictatorship someplace where quality of life is especially poor. But it's not, IMO, any less fair than demanding people living under more successful systems use their own resources to bolster whatever was lacking in the inferior system.

The whole "base on the moon" thing? It speaks more to me of a larger idea that someday, Earth might not be big enough for all of us to live comfortably. The moon was the object everyone clearly saw when looking up at the night sky, and the first one we succeeded in traveling to. So sure, you'd figure we'd have a lot of fiction referring to moon bases. But truthfully, it's not looking like all that wise of an idea to try to do it right now (if ever?). It might give people more square miles of space to spread out, but with no atmosphere, no bodies of fresh water, and no plants or trees growing there -- it would probably require a whole lot of regular deliveries of supplies from Earth to sustain it. What you want is to colonize a place that's quickly self-sustaining -- and I think we're going to find there are better choices than our moon for that. I don't think it's really about politicians considering it as a project, but saying "Nah... put that back on the shelf because I think we're going to get a better ROI starting a war with somebody!" I think it's about nobody currently having any means to cost justify doing it at ALL.

And as for that whole thing of fairly distributing gains from automation? I think that one's really LONG TERM predicting, vs. something that's just flat out incorrect based on what humans choose to do today. The process of automation is happening pretty gradually, despite all the hype. It has to, because robotics are still expensive and pretty limited in functionality. Yes, we've figured out how to automate things like automobile assembly or producing a fast food item, and we can probably tackle the problem of automating truck deliveries. But so far, you still have a lot of humans working at the auto plants and I imagine you'll still have humans working at restaurants for a LONG time to come. Humans like to interact with other people and especially for things like dining out, it's a social and entertainment experience as much as anything else. If you never get to speak with anyone except maybe some robotic order-taking robot? A lot of people will express the willingness to pay more to go elsewhere, where live interaction is still done.

And yes, if things reach the point where the majority are unable to find employment because everything has been automated? You'll have to go through a massive change in society to resolve it. It's no less revolutionary than a complete change of government. But the dust will eventually settle and knowing you can't really"un-invent" what's been invented? I'd say a prediction that society will morph into one where everyone has lots of free "personal time" is a likely end result. When we reach that stage? There won't really be a point to amassing wealth anymore. Maybe everyone in a country

Re:Really?

[dkf]

Global governance is "badly needed"?

Sure. We don't seem to be getting very much of it right now. (No, the US's imperial policy of the past 20 years is not a substitute.)

This.

[MickLinux]

I agree with parent, but let me try to drive it home. Sushi is largely... fish, well, okay. What's it wrapped in? Algae. So what's the fish, the mustard, the avocado slice? They're there for interest, color, and fllavoring. Do we have sushi bars? Yep.

Global population control regime? Ever here of the UN? Have you not noticed that they've been trying, and more and more successful?

Spiritual malaise: Foxconn is an excellent example. But considering that Asimov is from a Jewish culture [I think he was ... hereditarily Jewish, but not very religious] let me point out a judeo-christian concept: the physical and spiritual are inherently tied. So that un- and under-employment, the inequality, the endless hours spent on computer games, the school massacres, the suicides, the twerking, the reality shows, are all signs of spiritual malaise. A man who despises his neighbor is not healthy. Nor is a person who directs his/her sexuality to the masses, as opposed to using it to form a real, full, life-enhancing relationship with another person. Nor is a school shooter. To quote the Asimov quote in the article, "I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!". Enforced leisure is called unemployment. And yes, the most glorious single word seems more and more to be 'work'.

Re:This.

[ultranova]

To quote the Asimov quote in the article, "I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!". Enforced leisure is called unemployment. And yes, the most glorious single word seems more and more to be 'work'.

"Enforced leisure" doesn't make sense as a concept, since leisure is simply time when you don't have any pressing issues of survival at hand. Unemployment is not leisure any more than time spent desperately trying to find water in a desert would be. And Asimov was implying that work would be glorified since people were searching for meaning in their lives (and, oddly for a writer to assume, apparently unable to find it except in manual labour), while in our society work is glorified because our economic model is breaking down with automation, leaving more and more people destitute.

In other words, Asimov's prediction failed utterly. And it always had an undercurrent of "I can find purpose in writing but the unwashed masses can't", which is utter horseshit.

Re: This.

[gzuckier]

And Arthur Clarke was predicting us farming whales for food. ...

Where is Mobile?

[Ottibus]

The science and technology are amazingly accurate

I must have been reading a different article. The one I read had working Fusion reactors, cars that float above the ground, Cubic TVs, windowless underground houses, no electic cords, colonies on the moon and automatic cooking machines in every kitchen.

But the article has absolutely no mention of mobile devices which seems, to me, to be a massive failure of foresight.

Re:Where is Mobile?

[TClevenger]

I must have been reading a different article. The one I read had working Fusion reactors, cars that float above the ground, Cubic TVs, windowless underground houses, no electic cords, colonies on the moon and automatic cooking machines in every kitchen.

And human-like robots in every house, but computers that were still massive building-sized devices that required scientists keying in instructions on punch cards or ticker tape to use.

Re:Where is Mobile?

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

Yes he was mostly wrong, but

windowless underground houses

so he did predict people living in their parents basements because of "spiritual malaise".

Re:Where is Mobile?

[tragedy]

The one I read had working Fusion reactors, cars that float above the ground, Cubic TVs, windowless underground houses, no electic cords, colonies on the moon and automatic cooking machines in every kitchen.

Which is weird because the article I read had an experimental fusion power plant or two. Strangley enough, we've had "working Fusion reactors" for decades, making what you claimed he said something that actually exists, whereas actual fusion power plants don't exist. We do have, for example, ITER, the NIF, etc. however, which are pretty close to qualifying. We have cars that float above the ground, though they're certainly not operating on the roads as he predicted. As for 3D cube TVs, there are various prototypes and commercial products out there along those lines and all he predicted is that they would be showing off prototypes. Windowless underground houses certainly exist, they just aren't as popular as he thought. The no electric cord thing was based on predictions of ubiquitous RTGs, which are feasible enough, but not very likely considering paranoia about radiation. As for colonies on the moon... Well, we should have colonies on the moon. When Asimov wrote that, landing on the moon was only 5 years away. With the optomism about the future of the time, who could have imagined that we would do all that, then just forget about it? As for automatic cooking machines, we certainly aren't there yet. Of course, most of the food we consume is pre-prepared anyway.

Re:Where is Mobile?

[tragedy]

At least the poster you replied to had actually read the article we're discussing.

Borderline Facist

[Ottibus]

If you read a lot of his stories, they are about communist societies.

Most of his societies were based on benevolent Scientocracy: a small group of wise and powerful scientists ran the society for the benefit of the rest of the population. Look at the end of the Foundation series in particular, in which a highly secretive organisation called the Second Foundation was controlling and manipulating the whole of society with no form of accountability whatsoever.

I read a lot of Asimov as a teenager but stopped liking his writing when I realised just how much he was promoting right-wing authoritarian government rather than any real form of democracy or even accountability.

Re:Borderline Facist

[Anonymous Coward]

That was his brilliance. He made it seem that way, but the Second Foundation didn't really run everything it was Danieel the robot. And then he didn't decide everything, he left it up to the main character in the third Foundation book to decide the fate of everything.

I believe a lot of it was attempting to set up rules or societies with very specific rules, like the 3 rules of robotics. Then he came up with situations where it just didn't work. Second Foundation didn't control the fate of the universe, the singe hero got to do that and he learned the Second Foundation was set up and directed by a robot. Its a bit like Wizard of Oz, don't you mind the guy behind the green curtain we are the ones in control.

We're glad we don't have his mercury-pool vibrator

[Applehu Akbar]

Remember - this was Asimov's idea for storing large amounts of data. The office ENIAC would address data by reading microscopic vibrations set going within a large tank of mercury. Imagine the UPS it would take to make sure that a momentary power glitch wouldn't wipe out that entire centrally stored Encyclopedia Galactica, right in front of a line of a line of Galactic Empire citizens who had spent their life savings on an interstellar trip to Trantor to submit their punch-carded requests to the database....

Re:I bet he didn't predict Scientology would still

[BringsApples]

Yeah, well. I imagine that 'predicting the future' or whatever you'd call what he did (in my opinion, he was simply a philosopher with very accurate insight) is not as one would assume, there's probably a lot of 'haziness' to it. What he's calling "psychiatry" may, today, be called 'giving pills to the masses', as they do with children these days.

I know of a few schools that require certain types of children to be medicated, just to make the teacher's job easier - and I credit the reason for my assumption (as to why the teachers get to declare the the kid(s) need medication), to be the same as the reason for his assumption (that in the future, people will depend on psychiatry so much). As both demonstrate a deterioration in an evolving mankind's love for an evolving mankind.

Re:We're glad we don't have his mercury-pool vibra

[itsdapead]

Remember - this was Asimov's idea for storing large amounts of data. The office ENIAC would address data by reading microscopic vibrations set going within a large tank of mercury..

Sounds like the next step up from a bit of real ~1950 technology - the mercury delay line. Probably more plausible at the time than making valves - or even those new-fangled transistors - small and reliable enough to make fully electronic memory.

bullshit

[RelliK]

Just as with Nostradamus, bible, etc. "predictions" they kinda sorta came true if you squint at them the right way. And there are enough true believers to parrot praise in unison. However, a more objective look reveals that these "predictions" are way off.

A guaranteed income,

Welfare, housing assistance, charity. It's rough, but the basics are provided for if you go out and get them.

That is NOT guaranteed income. Welfare (in US at least) has existed since 1935, so that's hardly a prediction.

mass joblessness,

Underemployment. College grads are flipping burgers.

Not to the level that was predicted, and certainly not to the level afforded by guaranteed income.

and strict population controls

China did it. But yeah, it's really not a problem for first-worlders. Asimov didn't see that coming.

Precisely. *One* country has a problem with overpopulation. And their solution is NOT strict population controls, but economic disincentives for families that have more than one child (so it costs more, but rich families can afford it).

would all have much, much larger effects on the world we live in

You're using the term "would have" like these things didn't come to pass.

Because it fucking didn't. Quit trying to see things that are not there.

Re:bullshit

[DexterIsADog]

and strict population controls

China did it. But yeah, it's really not a problem for first-worlders. Asimov didn't see that coming.

Precisely. *One* country has a problem with overpopulation. And their solution is NOT strict population controls, but economic disincentives for families that have more than one child (so it costs more, but rich families can afford it).

You might want to read up a little more on that. China was forcibly aborting fetuses, and probably still are. I don't call that an "economic disincentive". See? http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/story/2012-07-25/China-forced-abortions/56465974/1

So if kidnapping women and injecting them with chemicals to kill their unborn fetus isn't "strict", I'd hate to see how bedtime is enforced in your house.

Re:bullshit

[CaptainLard]

*One* country has a problem with overpopulation.

India? That's still only two, but when only two countries contain 35% of the world's population its something to note.

Re:bullshit

[mangu]

That is NOT guaranteed income

And it shouldn't be. This "guaranteed income" is one more bullshit keynesian theory that will never work. All that a guaranteed income in cash could bring is inflation.

There are resources, like real estate, for instance, that are intrinsically limited. Distributing cash to everyone would increase the demand for these limited resources, without contributing anything to production. For a good example of this, look at what happened when the Community Reinvestment Act forced banks to give financing to anyone who wanted to buy a house.

We can offer people the basic needs, not a basic income. We can give them food, medical care, housing, etc, but not a significant income in cash. If, instead of providing people with financing to buy any house they wanted, the CRA had provided people in need with standard basic houses, the junk mortgage bubble would have never happened.

Re:bullshit

[martin-boundary]

The problem with your suggestion that money should be a gatekeeper system for scarce resources, is that undeserving people inherit money from their parents. So you always get an upper class of people with a guaranteed income (aka trust fund) who did nothing other than were born into the correct family. These people don't deserve to get first (and effectively guaranteed) access to scarce resources when other people can never do so, just because their parents happen to be poor.

Re:bullshit

[mangu]

Why is it fair to inherit money? Because it's like any other inheritance.

Is it fair that people inherit good looks from their parents? Or athletic potential? Try getting to play in the NBA if you had two very short parents.

Or what about the place where you were born? Is it fair that some people are born in Germany, Sweden, or the USA, while others are born in Somalia, Afghanistan, or North Korea?

The simple fact that you inherited money doesn't mean you didn't deserve it. You deserve it as much as anything else you got by pure chance.

If you think it would be fair to "equalize" the situation by taking away the money people inherit, then there are many other situations that should be equalized as well. One could start by abolishing nationalities, allowing everyone to live and work in whatever country they wanted. Then one should abolish all professional sport competitions, no one should be judged by their sports skills. Also, what about people with inherited musical skills? Get rid of music as a profession as well...

Re:bullshit

[terryk29]

...One could start by abolishing nationalities, allowing everyone to live and work in whatever country they wanted.

Yes, we could. (We could call it "free trade".) Actually, until we get over our nationalities, people could keep them, provided there was a way of internationally agreeing (and enforcing) that your nation can do what it wants provided people are free to leave.

Re:bullshit

[mangu]

provided people are free to leave.

But don't forget this is a two ended trip. There must also exist a provision that no country should be allowed to refuse immigrants.

If a person from India or Malawi wanted to go live in the USA or Western Europe they should be allowed to do so, without any hindrance.

Otherwise, it would be just a matter of luck that you inherited your parents' nationality.

Re: Brooding over existential issues

[TaoPhoenix]

"Brooding over existential issues is a pastime largely confined to the better off (it's hard to worry about the meaning of life when you're more worried about getting enough food to eat)."

I'm not sure this is true. Brooding is a Smart Person's activity. So for example with a junky job for example at the bottle factory I worked at in college, you had plenty of time to brood - all day every day! That's because you just packed boxes with empty gatorade boxes in the same pattern all eight hours a day.

Missed Internet

[manu0601]

Asimov missed Internet. Data networks have very little presence in his books. All we have are the hyper-wave communications, but we are not told what it is used for.

Re:Missed Internet

[rnd0001]

Interesting, that Velemir Khlebnikov, Russion poet, predicted Internet almost 100 years ago. If you replace the work Radio with Internet in his "Radio of the Future" poem, you will get what we have today (and even more) in the way which Internet is used for where even "remote villages" participate. I can't think of another example for predicting information society with such a detail.

Re:David Brin Earth did it more accurately

[toddestan]

I have to agree. For most older science fiction, I usually just pretend that the book takes place in an alternate universe that splits off of ours at the time of the copyright date. Such alternate universes may have had us living on the moon in the 1990's, or had us still using analog magnetic tape centuries into the future. David Brin's Earth is one of the very few books older science fiction books that felt like it could take place in the current future even though it was published over 20 years ago.

Asimov's essay is being misunderstood.

[craighansen]

When I was at the 1964 World's Fair, AT&T was showing off their "picturephone" which did everything he described for his 2014 prediction: "Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books." So how is that even a precient prediction when it was already at the Fair? Further, it hardly is a prediction of smartphones - there's nothing in this prediction that suggests the pervasive use of a wireless, portable, battery-powered device that performs computation and gaming along with communication - let alone the rounded corners that others joked about here.

The next sentence, predicting synchronous satellites, is also hardly precient given that "Unisphere," the symbol of the 1964 World's Fair, was a 12-story stainless steel globe with satellites circling it. I also note that the "Unisphere," a twelve-story stainless steel globe, was produced by and celebrated the glory days of U.S. Steel, which began in the 1960's to dramatically change its focus and after several reorganizations, now produces substantially less steel than it did in 1964. For me, the most glaring part of his mis-predictions were the heavy reliance on I.B.M., General Motors, and General Electric, presenting the assumption that these lumbering giants of the 1960's were going to be the vanguard of corporations in 2014.

Really, I see the first part of his essay as describing what the World's Fair itself was predicting about the future. The exhibits were presenting the view that these futuristic ideas were safely in the hands of large corporations, who were well-positioned to serve all the consumer's needs. The second part, starting with the Equitable Life sign projecting the future population growth, is his attempt to show that all will not be so rosy. However, while his total may have been about right, he missed that growth in the US will have slowed down, so we don't have the solid city from DC to Boston that he projected. His estimate of the pervasiveness of automation is surely off-the-mark as there's still plenty of physical drudgery being performed by humanity rather than robots, and so forth. His estimates of industrial and food production are similar to the "Club of Rome" predictions and don't really match up with where we are in 2014. The second part of his essay more accurately predicts his own science-fiction stories than today's reality, though we may be all the poorer for not having lived up to his stories.

most divergent???

[stenvar]

Most divergent of all, he believed that increasing automatization of labor would spawn not inequality or joblessness, but spiritual malaise

Increasing automation did not spawn joblessness. It may be contributing to inequality, by allowing some people to take better advantage of their talents, but that's not a bad thing.

Re:most divergent???

[bbsalem]

I am going to disagree with you on both counts. Technology has eliminated or degraded employment for many more people than it benefitted since 1990 or so. The inequalities are far greater and getting dangerous to the haves as the have-nots wise up to the source of the inequality and lack of opportunity for them, so creating elites is a bad thing. I did not put "talanted" in there since I think that doing engineering doesn't take much talent only preserverence, and the effort may be judged to have been misplaced, I am thinking of social media when I call it misplaced.

I offer the frenzy of tech companies trying to associate themselves with charities in Silicon Valley, help the homeless, help the hungry, at a fraction of the cost it would take to solve those problems.

As for spiritual milaise, I offer the profit motive and along with it the consumer society. Even the homeless in this country have it much better than the poor elsewhere, and what you have in life is pretty subjective. I think there are many many people who have quite a bit materially who are lost in this culture of shallow consumerism, every time one of those power mongers posts here about the inviolate rule of the profit motive in decisions, he is speaking of his own hole in the heart and his lack of imagination. There are many more reasons to do things, on your own even, than business pragmatism. I dare say that the level of unhappiness and violence is intimately linked to those same values for aggression unleashed is very destructive and appearantly there isn't enough oppportunity to be created by investors and businesses to soak up all that energy. I am lucky, very lucky, I am retired, and don't have lots of money, but I am rich beyond all compare for having several passions in life that were discouraged by others because they weren't directly profitable, and I have risen above pragmatism and am spiritually alive, unlike many people who are more "successful".

Re:most divergent???

[bbsalem]

You seem so emotionally worked up so as to not be able to argue and reason effectively. What I said must have really threatened you, Been watching too much Fox News, lately? Come back some other day when you can speak and argue with some more sense and less emotion, either that or you have no practice in thinking., whatsoever.

The divide in our country seems to be sparked by emotive words on people who lack the means to pick propaganda apart and discuss with any civility. You make my case for the manipulation of public opinion by a bunch of Plutocrats who support Right Wing positions who do not want people to have sensible discussions and debates. You seem to have swallowed the bait whole. Wise up and start laying down rational arguments, and get off you ass and reason!

Re:most divergent???

[stenvar]

You seem so emotionally worked up so as to not be able to argue and reason effectively

Says the guy who keeps ranting and raving about "inequality", "malaise", and "consumer society".

Wise up and start laying down rational arguments, and get off you ass and reason!

Again, it's you who has failed to make a coherent argument or present data.

The divide in our country seems to be sparked by emotive words on people who lack the means to pick propaganda apart and discuss with any civility.

You're behaving like a jerk; I think I have been more than civil with you. Do what you ask other people to do: present data and a reasoned argument, and treat other people with respect.

And stop being an unthinking mouthpiece for plutocrats and corporate interests, because that's exactly what you and people like you are: all those reforms you propose supposedly for the benefit of the people end up being means by which corporations enrich themselves further and in which competition and choice is stifled.

drop this trope

[cascadingstylesheet]

Most divergent of all, he believed that increasing automatization of labor would spawn not inequality or joblessness, but spiritual malaise.

Yeah, those robot armies of the 1930s were sure awful.

There has been pretty much no correlation of automation and bad economy. There were no special giant leaps in automation in the 1930s, 1970s, or 2008.

Deep down, you know who you have to thank for this economy ... but it's hard to admit you were wrong when you go so emotionally all in for a person and a political party.

Typical 50's hope for the future..

[doccus]

And Isaac Asimov led the pack. He didn't believe in the Orwellian idea, but rather the view in the foundation trilogy. With c3pO style robots. And A great planetary foundation, plus we've been going all over in ships. er.... Not.

Automation

[Lennie]

majority of mundane work, such as walking down the sidewalk, driving, or preparing our own meals. This obviously has not happened.

Let's see, segway and self driving cars exist and automation in factories is on the rise, even in China. Foxconn want to have it's first fully automated plant in 5 to 10 years.

Milking has already been fully automated for years now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_milking

The increased milking frequency also gives higher yield.

There will be more and more automation in the production of food.

Re: Automation

[Midnight_Falcon]

Okies..well, of course there is some automation -- but the scope of the automation is nowhere near what Asimov's prediction laid out. It seems at least a half-century to a century off..so it's not a very timely prediction.

Kiss my shiny metal ass, meatbag!

[Dabido]

Now here is one thing he correctly predicted. Leela's home!!!

"Futurama" may well display vistas of underground cities complete with light- forced vegetable gardens.

Fuck this post

[Jmac217]

Seriously, it's misleading and wrong. Get this shit out of here.