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

[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

[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.

Biggest oops

[blogan]

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

Re:Biggest oops

[ahaweb]

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

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: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?

"eating at multi-flavored algae bars"

[Culture20]

I eat at Taco Bell semi-regularly.

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.