Slashdot Mirror
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."
The summary links to four different commentaries but not Asimov's original article. I'd rather get it from the source.
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 ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
He keeps thinking there will be a 2014 World's Fair.
>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.
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%.
Seeing your gripe at Asimov's article I am very curious... What are your predictions for 2064?
The Year of Linux on the Desktop?
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
... 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.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
he failed to predict they would have rounded corners, which everyone knows is the true genius of the smartphone.
But most SF authors also predicted a future of humanoid robots.
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:
Don't be so dismissive of recipes.
The 2nd thing that the printing press was used for was recipes.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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.
factor 966971: 966971
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.
I have yet to see how inequality and joblessness don't cause "spiritual malaise" as a consequence. At least they certainly have "serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences", even if not along the same pathway. Ask your psychiatrist.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
I eat at Taco Bell semi-regularly.
Ever been to Whole Foods?
Tofu, Quinoa, Quorn, Seitan, Tempeh, ...
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Too soon
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
So, just like the Star Trek universe then?
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""
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
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.
If "spiritual malaise" doesn't describe 21st century America, then I don't know what does.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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.
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.
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.
Proverbs 21:19
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.
In 2064, I bet Nuclear Fusion as our common power source will only be 20 years away.
There may be no "I" in team, but there's also no "F" in way.
But he also thought we'd have a colony on the moon, be living under a global population control regime, eating at multi-flavored algae bars, and letting machines prepare us personalized meals
multi-flavor algae: Sodium alginate is a major food additive. many flavors.
global population control regime:
china we all know about:
uzbekistan: forced sterilization or IUD.
india: more than two children and you can't particiapte in many elective offices
iran: manadatory contraception to obtain marriage lic.
USA: ask Sarah Palin what she thinks of Title X
Israel: ordered sterilizations.
Auomated custom meal preparation robots:
http://www.psfk.com/2012/11/burger-making-robot.html#!rgOyn
Automated labor sparks malaise:
Foxcon suicide fences. no layoffs just repetitive work that machines won't do.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
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.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
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.