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How Isaac Asimov shaped robotics and space exploration and predicted the Internet
- mercer 9y agoReminds me of ["The Machine Stops"][1] by E.M. Forster from 1909 that, from what I remember, was even more uncanny in how it predicted social media and whatnot. [1]: http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html
- pferde 9y agoWhile the accuracy of the quoted prediction is uncanny, I would be interested in reading Asimov's other, less accurate predictions. Those are usually quite amusing - or sometimes sad, depending on how you feel about humanity putting focus on wrong things.
- teekert 9y agoAfaik those predictions relate mostly to nuclear power (main source power in the Foundation trilogy), from the article linked in the post among others: The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. The isotopes will not be expensive for they will be by- products of the fission-power plants which, by 2014, will be supplying well over half the power needs of humanity. But once the isotype batteries are used up they will be disposed of only through authorized agents of the manufacturer.
- swiley 9y agoThe idea that manufacturers would coordinate that well seems silly.
- davedx 9y agoHah. Interesting that he predicted large scale solar PV deployments too. (In my mind, that's an even more impressive prediction given the state/cost of PV tech in the 60's). Even more interesting, I would say (though who knows) this power mix he predicted (nuclear + solar) will be much closer to what we end up with on Mars, which he also made predictions about.
- eesmith 9y agoNo, he didn't. You are reading too much into his prediction because you know the outcome. He wrote: "Large solar-power stations will also be in operation in a number of desert and semi-desert areas -- Arizona, the Negev, Kazakhstan." There's nothing in the prediction which implies that the solar power would be based on PV. I think there's a higher likelihood he was thinking of heliostats. Solar One, a solar thermal power plant built in Mojave Desert, produced 10MW of electricity back in the 1980s.
- davedx 9y ago> I think there's a higher likelihood he was thinking of heliostats. You mean CSP? Why do you think that? Silicon PV was available in the 1960's and widely used in the space program. It's been around for longer than the first CSP plant that was built 4 years after Asimov made his predictions in 1964. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#cite_note-21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#cite_...
- eesmith 9y agoBecause solar power is older than that CSP. For example, Mouchot's work on solar power in the the 1870s - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustin_Mouchot#Solar_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustin_Mouchot#Solar_researc... . His machine generated steam that could be used for mechanical power. At that point it's trivial to produce electricity. It just won't be cheap electricity. In 1941 Asimov wrote the short story "Reason", which took place in a solar power satellite which beamed power down to Earth. He at this time wasn't thinking about PV, because it didn't meaningfully exist, and the story only talks about a "converter". (The station is also a mile across, and in solar orbit.) There's another SF book I read, probably written in the 1950s, about building such a power plant in Earth orbit. It used a mirror to heat up material in its focus to generate power. (One of the side plots of the story was that some TV show was being filmed on the construction site, and the lead actor, in a space suit, almost drifted through the invisible focus.) This is why I'm sure that SF at the time didn't say that solar power stations had to be PV. I looked around for something more definitive. In 1981 Asimov wrote "How Did We Find About Solar Power", available at https://archive.org/stream/HowDidWeFindAboutSolarPower-English-IsaacAsimov/solarpix#page/n0/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/HowDidWeFindAboutSolarPower-Engli... . That booklet predicts PV use for the future. (It's also where I learned specifically about Mouchot's work.) In the 1980s he know the cost of PV power was growing ever cheaper. What it doesn't answer is what Asimov thought in the 1960s. He might simply have left it open, as he did in "Reason". So, I could be wrong about my belief. But it's surely not obvious that Asimov is specifically predicting PV over other possibilities that he reasonably know about.
- eesmith 9y agoThere are several other failures from the 50 years in the future piece for the World's Fair: > Jets of compressed air will also lift land vehicles off the highways, which, among other things, will minimize paving problems. Smooth earth or level lawns will do as well as pavements. Bridges will also be of less importance, since cars will be capable of crossing water on their jets, though local ordinances will discourage the practice. > you will be able to reach someone at the moon colonies > Most surprising and, in some ways, heartening, 2014 will see a good beginning made in the colonization of the continental shelves. Underwater housing will have its attractions to those who like water sports, and will undoubtedly encourage the more efficient exploitation of ocean resources, both food and mineral. General Motors shows, in its 1964 exhibit, the model of an underwater hotel of what might be called mouth-watering luxury. The 2014 World's Fair will have exhibits showing cities in the deep sea with bathyscaphe liners carrying men and supplies across and into the abyss.
- ThomPete 9y agoIt can be argued that the reason that didnt happen was because of all the anti-nuclear protests that made it a toxic energy.
- eesmith 9y agoI don't think that argument holds water. There are no radioisotopes which fit that requirement. The closest is 238Pu, which is most commonly used in RTGs, but also in a few pacemakers. A fridge pulls about 60W, so let's say the battery needs to supply 80W on average (assume some heavy-duty capacitors to smooth things out). Wikipedia says that the power density of 238Pu is 0.54 watts per gram. That's about 150 grams of 238Pu per household. http://ne.oregonstate.edu/rebuilding-supply-pu-238 http://ne.oregonstate.edu/rebuilding-supply-pu-238 says 238Pu costs roughly $8 million per kilogram. If we can reduce that by 100x then that's still $12,000. It seems like it's cheaper to have things hooked up to a power grid, with batteries for those short times that grid power doesn't work, than to use radioisotopes.
- ThomPete 9y agoThe point is that if we haven't had all the opposition we would have been further with our development in this area.
- eesmith 9y agoI understood the point. My response was that there are two options: 1) discover a radioisotope we don't know about, or 2) find some way to reduce the price by a factor of 1,000. The thing is, we know all of the radioisotopes now, at least, all with a lifespan measured in years and which can be made on macroscopic scales. Thus, it can't be #1. (Or, which alternative do you think is better?) Are you proposing that it's #2? If so, why do you think a factor of 1,000 in cost savings is possible? One way to make 238Pu is to start with spent nuclear fuel. If we had enough spent nuclear fuel to make batteries for every household, we would have had far more nuclear power in the first place.
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- Udik 9y agoIf you check the original article, the vast majority of his predictions is widely off the mark. This article is rather dishonest in trying to single out a few excerpts, even out of context, to paint a different picture.
- davedx 9y agoFYI: Asimov was in the news recently because SpaceX chose the first three books from his Foundation Trilogy to launch into trans-Mars orbit aboard the first Falcon Heavy. https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/2/6/16980538/spacex-falcon-heavy-isaac-asimovs-foundation-series https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/2/6/16980538/spacex-falco...
- sizzzzlerz 9y agoAs far as I'm concerned, there are only three books: the original trilogy that he wrote in the 1940s. The sequels he wrote in the 80s have no where near the charm or interest. They were written to capture the money from those who fondly remember the original. I started reading Foundation's Edge and quickly gave it up. I never bothered with the others.
- jeandejean 9y agoI love Asimov, but he predicted so many things that some ended true, some didn't. It feels like people only see the bright side, and I understand why, but come on, he said unrealistic things too, that were an extrapolation from life in the 60s rather than an accurate prediction. That being said, long live Isaac Asimov work, your books are amazing!
- colomon 9y agoThis has the feel of having been written by an impressionable 20-something. In 1988, predicting "One essential thing would be a screen on which you could display things, and another essential part would be a printing mechanism on which things could be printed for you. And you’ll have to have a keyboard on which you ask your questions’ although ideally I would like to see one that could be activated by voice," was if anything badly retro. Everything he mentions there except voice control was already a standard consumer product in 1988! And voice control was how the computers in Star Trek worked 20 years earlier. From 1964: "Complete lunches and dinners, with the food semiprepared, will be stored in the freezer until ready for processing. I suspect, though, that even in 2014 it will still be advisable to have a small corner in the kitchen unit where the more individual meals can be prepared by hand, especially when company is coming." Frozen TV dinners were a decade old when he wrote that. And they don't even vaguely dominate the food market today in the way he suggests they will. (If anything the big differences between 1964 and today are much greater availability of fresh foods and eating out being much more common.) EVERYONE predicted video-phones back in the 60s -- hell, the Jetsons cartoon beat him to the punch there by a couple of years! Generally, people predicted they would be common much earlier than they actually were, and no one predicted you'd carry them around in your pocket -- or be more likely to just text a message than to use them. For my money the most interesting predictions here are the ones where he predicts things will go more slowly than most people at the time thought -- for instance, predicting man will have not walked on Mars in 2014 was surprisingly conservative for an SF writer in 1964, but it was also dead right.
- petters 9y agoThe movie Modern Times (1936) had a video phone in the factory, if I recall correctly.
- acqq 9y agoYou‘re right, just watched the factory scenes! Very big screens.
- jacquesm 9y ago> although ideally I would like to see one that could be activated by voice Dragon Systems was founded in the early 1980's.
- madengr 9y agoNo one ever mentions the 0th law, which was probably the most important, at least in the books. Almost finished reading the entire Robot/Empire/Foundation series. That “I, Robot” movie was garbage; absolutely nothing to do with the Robot series. Just finished The Currents of Space. Pretty depressing, that (probably) 10k years in the future, humans are still exploiting each other. Asimov probably has it spot on.
- boojing 9y agoI started binge reading Asimov's books in that order as well and I share you sentiments. I guess that I liked the robot series more than Foundation since the characters were more relatable.
- arbie 9y agoThe Seldon Plan is both the protagonist and antagonist of the Foundation trilogy. The human characters are merely incidental. A masterful achievement. I see the beginnings of something similar with The Flow in The Collapsing Empire.
- the_af 9y ago> That “I, Robot” movie was garbage; absolutely nothing to do with the Robot series Indeed. Wasn't the rumor that "I, Robot" was originally a script called "Hardwired" (or something like that), and that the Asimov-specific elements were pasted on top of it at the last minute? Regardless, the movie is trash and goes pretty much against the spirit of all Asimov ever wrote :/
- ncmncm 9y agoHis influence on robotics has been mostly negative, although the mechanism has been mostly journalistic stupidity. The "three laws" could never be implemented in hardware, they were just rules about how to make stories. "Suppose robots followed these. What would happen?" His answer was that they would quietly take over the world and keep us as pets. Because nothing like them could be implemented, there was no predictive value. The actual outcome, without laws and with corporations standing in for the robots, is that we are livestock and vermin, according to individual usefulness and accidents of birth.
- madengr 9y agoWhy couldn't they be implemented in hardware? Through the whole Robot series he describes them as "potentials" summing to force a decision, and even the self-conceived 0th law takes precedence, though not for G.R. It's obvious the positronic brain isn't based on logic, rather an analog brain with trillions of "pathways" that can be "frozen" and never re-started (as you would a program). There isn't even a concept of finite data storage. D.O. doesn't know how long it will take to fill up his brain, though he records everything and can't forget it. SPOILER: Though in the end of the Foundation series, we have some clues.
- mrob 9y agoThe laws don't have any objective interpretation. What exactly is "harm" from a mathematical point of view? This is good for storytelling, because it let Asimov write stories about robots behaving in strange ways, and the protagonists struggling to figure out how it made sense as a possible interpretation of the laws, but it's no good for actually building robots.
- krapp 9y agoYes, people who take Asimov's laws seriously seem to forget that they didn't even work in-universe, which was kind of the point.
- the_af 9y ago> His answer was that they would quietly take over the world and keep us as pets That wasn't Asimov's answer, outside a few atypical robots-as-a-menace stories. Even the Zeroth Law cannot be misconstrued as "keeping humans as pets" :)
- tzs 9y agoPeople always seem to focus on the things science fiction writers include in the stories of the future. Someone, I think it may have been Asimov, but it might have been Heinlein or one of the other big names of that era, said that these are the least important things that science fiction writers predict. What is important, he said, was not the gadgets of the future, but how they change us. Predicting ubiquitous robots or personal jetpacks would be like a writer in 1880 predicting cars replacing horses. Sure, cars replacing horses is interesting...but what is important is predicting what the increased speed and range of cars over horses would do to everyday life. What do cars do to teen and young adult dating habits, for instance? With a car it is much easier to arrange a quick hook up with someone away from the prying eyes of your parents. That could have big ramifications. The future is more than just the present with nicer gadgets.
- Cyph0n 9y agoWell said. Great science fiction keeps the technology in the background and simply uses it to further the story. But excellent science fiction makes the plot so believable that the tech just seems natural. My go-to example of such sci-fi is Solaris. I think it's much harder to achieve this in a single novel because it's typically less annoying to the reader when exposition is spread over multiple novels. Examples of the former (in my opinion): Ender series, The Forever War, Xenogenesis series, Contact, Nexus. Examples of the latter: Red Rising, Foundation, The Expanse, Three Body series, Ghost in the Shell (Japanese manga).
- sametmax 9y agoOr the excellent book "carbon altered", which they adapted this year as an beautiful tv show. In this novel, people can be immortal and that's almost like saying the can buy bread or drive cars. Of course it gives opportunities for a great plot. But even better, the civilization that is being built on top of that is very interesting.
- CodeMage 9y ago"Altered Carbon" is a great book and a mediocre TV show, precisely because the book explores the effect of its fictional technology on society, whereas the TV show mostly focuses on shiny visuals. I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone interested in exploring what our society might look like if we were to achieve our dreams of immortality.
- Noos 9y agoHe didn't shape much at all. Asimov was the literal definition of a hack; he churned out writings more or less nonstop, and most of his work is nonfiction and forgotten in time. His science fiction in general wasn't particularly that good, and he's more of a prototype of Michael Crichton when you consider his fiction; both managed to seize on a single idea that was striking, but were unable to go beyond that idea with the rest of their output. I read him growing up, too, even his David Starr and Norby books, and he never really caught my attention. Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai Saga is a much better version of the Foundation books, and for all of the love of the Three Laws of Robotics, they really just were devices for science fiction versions of locked room mysteries.
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoHa! I can't stand the Dorsai stuff; Asimov rules. He inspired a generation to harden their science, and make it pivotal to the science fiction story. It takes all kinds.
- Noos 9y agoHow is his stuff hard science? He made up the positronic brain, and his whole psychohistory was just absurd; if anything, the idea of a brilliant cabal of scientists and technicians using psychohistory to predict the future is just dressed up witchcraft than real science. Stuff like Nightfall is just embarrassing. Most of his science output was in a bunch of nonfiction books that I'm not even sure are still in print, and he had a rep for churning out books on every subject at lightning speed, rather than for great insight. Dorsai and Dickson's stuff had issues too, but he was much better at writing people as well as ideas, and he's had a longer, better overall career at writing science fiction and fantasy. Asimov was probably the first household name writer, but really needs to be viewed a lot more critically then the fandom does.
- eesmith 9y agoWho do you think wrote hard science fiction which didn't have its absurd aspects? Heinlein, writing about ESP, and FTL? Niven too, for that matter. FWIW, Asimov's "Evidence" is listed as a representative example of hard science fiction at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction .
- skookumchuck 9y agoThe predictions of the internet in 1988 were hardly prophetic, since there were already global computer networks in place at the time. Clarke predicted the iphone in 1976 with the 'minisec' in "Imperial Earth". Hogan predicted the internet in "The Genesis Machine" in 1978.
- H4CK3RM4N 9y agoI'm amazed that this article skips over the fact that Asimov invented the term "robotics", and co-opted "robot" for autonomous machines.