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What Isaac Asimov Taught Us About Predicting the Future

91 points by tomerbd 8y ago

Reedx 8y ago
Relatedly, here's what Asimov predicted for 2019: https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/12/27/35-years-ago-isaac-asimov-was-asked-by-the-star-to-predict-the-world-of-2019-here-is-what-he-wrote.html https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/12/27/35-years-ago-i...
- thunderbong 8y ago
  Thanks. That was really good. I just wish the following was true. >> The consequences of human irresponsibility in terms of waste and pollution will become more apparent and unbearable with time and again, attempts to deal with this will become more strenuous. It is to be hoped that by 2019, advances in technology will place tools in our hands that will help accelerate the process whereby the deterioration of the environment will be reversed.
  - crag 8y ago
    Well he's right about the first party. As for the tools... people need to vote.. in the US at least.
    - mywittyname 8y ago
      Problems are easy to predict. The technological solutions to those problems are predictable by a sufficiently educated person. Politics is impossible to predict. Even if you're dead on about how a group of people feel in one region, go 200 miles west, you may be completely wrong.
    - WorldMaker 8y ago
      There is some hope at this point that he's right about the second part, too. It reads as mixed hope as quoted and that's about what we are seeing. - Advances in wind and solar energy generation in 2018 have pushed those to being the cheapest and most efficient they've ever been. The economic case for wind/solar is now such that it is far cheaper than non-renewable alternatives, and with or without political drive in 2019 there's a chance that pure capitalist greed still pushes past some major thresholds in renewable energy portfolios versus the alternatives. - Similarly, 2018 seems to have pushed us past several remaining electric vehicle adoption hurdles and promises that we'll really start to feel the affects of that in 2019 and 2020. (VW's electric fleet roll out / course correction due to the dieselgate fallout will particularly be something to watch this year.) Admittedly, without political drivers we're still likely to see an aging ICE long tail, but again this is mixed hope that we have the technology, now we just need to find the will. Here too there is mixed hope economically that costs and supply chains are going to be driven down on EVs enough (maybe not this year, but soon; again my eye is on what will happen with VW's fleet changes as headwind, and also the huge electric fleet leaps happening in China) that we may see some very interesting cases where EVs start to be drastically cheaper than ICE vehicles. The conditions are ripe for some interesting supply chain shakeups in cars over the next few years, possibly to the planet's benefit. - 2018 saw some really interesting technical developments in meat substitutes (Impossible Foods in particular doing some really interesting stuff). I have no idea if there is political or economic hope that we'll see more adoption of such things in 2019 as a matter of course, but I do know that White Castle sells Impossible Sliders and that seems like a hopeful sign. - News recently about "sponges" that can capture atmospheric Carbon without impacting atmospheric Nitrogen may mean we are closer to technology breakthroughs in carbon capture than we think. [1] As only a hobbyist/armchair future historian, I can see room at least for mixed hope. I suppose mixed hope is better than nothing here. [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/corkscrew-sponge-sucks-up-carbon-dioxide-ignores-nitrogen/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/corkscrew-sponge-suc...
- Tasboo 8y ago
  This is a better article IMO. Thanks for posting.
- kbob 8y ago
  It's interesting that in 1983 global warming was not on Asimov's radar. He mentioned overpopulation and pollution, but nothing about CO2.
reednj 8y ago
The article has basically nothing to do with the title. It is a recap of the plot of the foundation series and an extended analogy about how trump is the same as the Mule
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dmead 8y ago
  neat. was this article plagiarized? https://www.eclectablog.com/2016/05/donald-trump-is-playing-the-role-of-the-mule-from-isaac-asimovs-foundation-trilogy.html https://www.eclectablog.com/2016/05/donald-trump-is-playing-...
  - gaius 8y ago
    The NYT has form for it recently, they’ve rehashed some of Laura Loomer’s old work for example.
- ancorevard 8y ago
  The NYT article also managed, predictably, to align Trump with Hitler. Will media never learn, or is this also part of the patterns we should expect to see from psychohistory?
- ummonk 8y ago
  Yeah, apparently the Russians gave Trump superpowers like the Mule now.
- thecanman 8y ago
  It's disappointing to start reading a potentially interesting article about Asimov only to find out halfway through it's being used as another anti-Trump piece instead of concluding with anything insightful.
aaron695 8y ago
The article is rambling so I'll digress to the title - He wrote a big article on how no one else was allowed to use his Three Laws of Robots. Copyright him. Which I always found strange, here was his chance to be the future. Reality is no one will ever use them though, war is important to humans for starters. But he wasn't helping his chances. 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. [It was only the one article I know of, I'm not sure if he stuck to it, people make mistakes]
barry-cotter 8y ago
If you’re interested in predicting the future read Philip Tetlock’s Superforecasting. In general people don’t make precise predictions to be right or wrong. Review https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/10/superforecastin.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/10/superforecastin.htm... https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/10/outside_first.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/10/outside_first.html Superforecasting on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0771070527/ref=cm_cr_arp_mb_bdcrb_top?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0771070527/ref=cm_cr_arp_mb_b... Tetlock’s Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock Econtalk interview podcast with Tetlock https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/econtalk/id135066958 https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/econtalk/id135066958
- bloak 8y ago
  But before reading "Superforecasting", read Jackal's two-star review on Amazon. I agree with that well-written review, which also recommends other things to read.
  - dmos62 8y ago
    This is not the first time I get very good recommendations from Jackal. Who is he?
netcan 8y ago
Asimov is definitely a favourite and the use of fiction to explore otherwise polical/philosophical ideas is something I wish we had more of. That said, seeing the world as predictable cycles is... a strong theme in modern history/political philosophy & not unique to him. That's (imo) what makes the psychohistory great. It's a fictionalised form of an idea that appears everywhere humans try to think of a big picture. Destiny.. fate. Marx was explicitly deterministic in his historical materialism theory, his core idea, and possibly the thing Asimov was parodying in psychohistory. Economics as a whole could be thing Asimov was parodying. The like of to set Malthus, Ricardo and even Keynes played this game. Modern economists (notably thomas picketty) predict cycles, their inevitable consequences and 2nd order effects. New/neo liberalism in the 80s & 90s had a strong, economics-oriented idea that the world would inevitably move towards liberal democracy and it's economic institutions. Gibbon's "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" has strong deterministic themes: success, decadence, collapse, renewal. Yuval Noah Harare's "Sapiens" has its driving theme of human history (a march towards more & better cooperation). The history leads directly into futurism & prediction in the sequel... also deterministic themes. Destiny has been a favourite theme in our stories since our first stories.
- dankwatch 8y ago
  If you're not familiar with it, you should check out generational archetypes. It's the cyclical nature of generations, not empires. Anecdotally, it seems fairly accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...

91 points by tomerbd 8y ago

Relatedly, here's what Asimov predicted for 2019: https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/12/27/35-years-ago-isaac-asimov-was-asked-by-the-star-to-predict-the-world-of-2019-here-is-what-he-wrote.html https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2018/12/27/35-years-ago-i...

thunderbong 8y ago
Thanks. That was really good. I just wish the following was true. >> The consequences of human irresponsibility in terms of waste and pollution will become more apparent and unbearable with time and again, attempts to deal with this will become more strenuous. It is to be hoped that by 2019, advances in technology will place tools in our hands that will help accelerate the process whereby the deterioration of the environment will be reversed.
- crag 8y ago
  Well he's right about the first party. As for the tools... people need to vote.. in the US at least.
  - mywittyname 8y ago
    Problems are easy to predict. The technological solutions to those problems are predictable by a sufficiently educated person. Politics is impossible to predict. Even if you're dead on about how a group of people feel in one region, go 200 miles west, you may be completely wrong.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    There is some hope at this point that he's right about the second part, too. It reads as mixed hope as quoted and that's about what we are seeing. - Advances in wind and solar energy generation in 2018 have pushed those to being the cheapest and most efficient they've ever been. The economic case for wind/solar is now such that it is far cheaper than non-renewable alternatives, and with or without political drive in 2019 there's a chance that pure capitalist greed still pushes past some major thresholds in renewable energy portfolios versus the alternatives. - Similarly, 2018 seems to have pushed us past several remaining electric vehicle adoption hurdles and promises that we'll really start to feel the affects of that in 2019 and 2020. (VW's electric fleet roll out / course correction due to the dieselgate fallout will particularly be something to watch this year.) Admittedly, without political drivers we're still likely to see an aging ICE long tail, but again this is mixed hope that we have the technology, now we just need to find the will. Here too there is mixed hope economically that costs and supply chains are going to be driven down on EVs enough (maybe not this year, but soon; again my eye is on what will happen with VW's fleet changes as headwind, and also the huge electric fleet leaps happening in China) that we may see some very interesting cases where EVs start to be drastically cheaper than ICE vehicles. The conditions are ripe for some interesting supply chain shakeups in cars over the next few years, possibly to the planet's benefit. - 2018 saw some really interesting technical developments in meat substitutes (Impossible Foods in particular doing some really interesting stuff). I have no idea if there is political or economic hope that we'll see more adoption of such things in 2019 as a matter of course, but I do know that White Castle sells Impossible Sliders and that seems like a hopeful sign. - News recently about "sponges" that can capture atmospheric Carbon without impacting atmospheric Nitrogen may mean we are closer to technology breakthroughs in carbon capture than we think. [1] As only a hobbyist/armchair future historian, I can see room at least for mixed hope. I suppose mixed hope is better than nothing here. [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/corkscrew-sponge-sucks-up-carbon-dioxide-ignores-nitrogen/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/corkscrew-sponge-suc...
Tasboo 8y ago
This is a better article IMO. Thanks for posting.
kbob 8y ago
It's interesting that in 1983 global warming was not on Asimov's radar. He mentioned overpopulation and pollution, but nothing about CO2.

reednj 8y ago

The article has basically nothing to do with the title. It is a recap of the plot of the foundation series and an extended analogy about how trump is the same as the Mule

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dmead 8y ago
neat. was this article plagiarized? https://www.eclectablog.com/2016/05/donald-trump-is-playing-the-role-of-the-mule-from-isaac-asimovs-foundation-trilogy.html https://www.eclectablog.com/2016/05/donald-trump-is-playing-...
- gaius 8y ago
  The NYT has form for it recently, they’ve rehashed some of Laura Loomer’s old work for example.
ancorevard 8y ago
The NYT article also managed, predictably, to align Trump with Hitler. Will media never learn, or is this also part of the patterns we should expect to see from psychohistory?
ummonk 8y ago
Yeah, apparently the Russians gave Trump superpowers like the Mule now.
thecanman 8y ago
It's disappointing to start reading a potentially interesting article about Asimov only to find out halfway through it's being used as another anti-Trump piece instead of concluding with anything insightful.

aaron695 8y ago

The article is rambling so I'll digress to the title - He wrote a big article on how no one else was allowed to use his Three Laws of Robots. Copyright him. Which I always found strange, here was his chance to be the future. Reality is no one will ever use them though, war is important to humans for starters. But he wasn't helping his chances. 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. [It was only the one article I know of, I'm not sure if he stuck to it, people make mistakes]

barry-cotter 8y ago

If you’re interested in predicting the future read Philip Tetlock’s Superforecasting. In general people don’t make precise predictions to be right or wrong. Review https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/10/superforecastin.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/10/superforecastin.htm... https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/10/outside_first.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/10/outside_first.html Superforecasting on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0771070527/ref=cm_cr_arp_mb_bdcrb_top?ie=UTF8 https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0771070527/ref=cm_cr_arp_mb_b... Tetlock’s Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock Econtalk interview podcast with Tetlock https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/econtalk/id135066958 https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/econtalk/id135066958

bloak 8y ago
But before reading "Superforecasting", read Jackal's two-star review on Amazon. I agree with that well-written review, which also recommends other things to read.
- dmos62 8y ago
  This is not the first time I get very good recommendations from Jackal. Who is he?

netcan 8y ago

Asimov is definitely a favourite and the use of fiction to explore otherwise polical/philosophical ideas is something I wish we had more of. That said, seeing the world as predictable cycles is... a strong theme in modern history/political philosophy & not unique to him. That's (imo) what makes the psychohistory great. It's a fictionalised form of an idea that appears everywhere humans try to think of a big picture. Destiny.. fate. Marx was explicitly deterministic in his historical materialism theory, his core idea, and possibly the thing Asimov was parodying in psychohistory. Economics as a whole could be thing Asimov was parodying. The like of to set Malthus, Ricardo and even Keynes played this game. Modern economists (notably thomas picketty) predict cycles, their inevitable consequences and 2nd order effects. New/neo liberalism in the 80s & 90s had a strong, economics-oriented idea that the world would inevitably move towards liberal democracy and it's economic institutions. Gibbon's "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" has strong deterministic themes: success, decadence, collapse, renewal. Yuval Noah Harare's "Sapiens" has its driving theme of human history (a march towards more & better cooperation). The history leads directly into futurism & prediction in the sequel... also deterministic themes. Destiny has been a favourite theme in our stories since our first stories.

dankwatch 8y ago
If you're not familiar with it, you should check out generational archetypes. It's the cyclical nature of generations, not empires. Anecdotally, it seems fairly accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...