12 ms·
Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014
- adamnemecek 13y agoSome of these are actually pretty prescient. Particularly this one "Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence." Rest is pretty hilarious. E.g. "Any number of simultaneous conversations between earth and moon can be handled by modulated laser beams, which are easy to manipulate in space. On earth, however, laser beams will have to be led through plastic pipes, to avoid material and atmospheric interference. Engineers will still be playing with that problem in 2014."
- thirsteh 13y agoHilarious? Sad, rather.
- skaevola 13y agoFunny because fiber optic cable have been in use for more than a decade?
- JonnieCache 13y agoI'm pretty sure that is exactly what does go on, dude. Apart from the living on the moon bit, obviously.
- adamnemecek 13y agoI was specifically talking about the communication with moon. I find it funny how back in the day, futurologists were obsessed with it.
- coldtea 13y ago>I was specifically talking about the communication with moon. I find it funny how back in the day, futurologists were obsessed with it. What's funny about it? The President himself (JFK) had promised that the US will send "a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth" by the end of the sixties. If the same amount of money and determination was continued post-1969, moon colonies (colonies of scientists, like in Alaska, not some kind of new state on the moon), would have been a very real possibility.
- jpttsn 13y agoI think it's funny in a way that's symptomatic of us nerds' future predictions: much more focus on what's possible than on what's useful/enjoyable. We focus on extrapolating technological advances, at the expense of a basic marketing/human interest mindset. In considering ceilings and walls that "glow softly, and in a variety of colors" the right observation is not that it will be feasible by 2014, but that nobody older than seven would genuinely want this in their home :)
- JonnieCache 13y agoIndeed. While there was the famous http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment apparently most space communication happens via the usual parabolic/phased array antennae: http://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/pub1/bapna_deepak_1996_1/bapna_deepak_1996_1.pdf http://www.ri.cmu.edu/pub_files/pub1/bapna_deepak_1996_1/bap... KISS is doubly important in space I suppose. EDIT: reading that wiki article it seems the first lunar laser experiments happened in 1962, so we may have found Asimov's inspiration. EDIT2: nope, apparently he was spot on after all ;)
- The_Double 13y ago10/22/2013 NASA Laser Communication System Sets Record with Data Transmissions to and from Moon http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/october/nasa-laser-communication-system-sets-record-with-data-transmissions-to-and-from/ http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/october/nasa-laser-communicat...
- mturmon 13y agoThanks for finding this link. This has been a technology under development for a long time. The typical technology for deep space communications is radio. There are a few missions coming up that will require this bandwidth.
- salient 13y agoWe have laser connection to the moon now, actually. And he was right about fiber optic cables, too.
- edward 13y agoI like this one: “The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes.”
- binarymax 13y agoI found that one particularly interesting, as That was a core theme of his "Foundation" novels. Those who were able to gadgetize nuclear energy were at a distinct advantage over others.
- mariuolo 13y agoNot RTG-based, but still a seriously proposed concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
- polymathist 13y agoWouldn't be surprised if something like that is coming soon. Maybe not radioisotopes exactly, but something. Battery technology has been one of the major bottlenecks in advancing electronics, mobile computing, and transportation. It's an area ripe for change, and the economic pressure/incentive is definitely there.
- DonGateley 13y agoI look around me and see that everything to which a power cord is attached has evolved enormously since his prediction or didn't exist at all. Yet the cord remains as it was a couple centuries ago. This has always amazed me and as I look at the incredible rats nest of them around me I do hope for a breakthrough.
- ams6110 13y agoA lot of things haven't changed at all. Televisions (apart from the screen itself), most kitchen and household appliances, all almost exactly as they were 50 years ago.
- unfunco 13y agoThe one that stands out for me: [M]ankind 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. Whilst psychiatry isn't yet the most important specialty in medicine, we are beginning to fall into boredom all too easily, most people can't go a few minutes without looking at their smartphones, most can't live in the moment – yesterday I watched the New Years Eve fireworks on the Thames in London, and the ground was lit up brighter with the screens of phones than the sky was with fireworks.
- kingkawn 13y agoPsychiatry is coming.
- 11thEarlOfMar 13y agoHere is a prediction: Over the next 50 years, mental health will become the primary affliction of humanity. The more discontinuity we have with the world we are evolved to inhabit, the less relevant we become to the world, the more mental health problems will loom in our lives. Suppressed by medications of all manor, perhaps. But an affliction nonetheless.
- polymathist 13y agoMy prediction is that advances in neurology in the next 50 years will make our current understanding of mental health look like homeopathy. It is very difficult today to accurately diagnose people with mental diseases like ADD or depression when we don't understand how the brain works on that level of detail. My understanding is that it still depends largely on interview-style questions about what the person is feeling. Imagine what will happen when "How do you feel?" turns into "Please relax as I use this scanner/cap/whatever to observe how you feel," when mental diseases can be defined in precisely in terms of neurological functions (or malfunctions). If those kinds of advancements happen we'll be far more prepared to address boredom and other mental health problems. Edit: Not to diminish what psychiatrists and doctors are doing today. They're doing the best they can with our current understanding and technology and probably helping a lot of people.
- JeffL 13y agoA lot of it is really good, but the part about boredom is interesting: “[M]ankind 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.” One thing we haven't had any trouble with in terms of advancement is how to entertain people. Facebook, Twitter, World of Warcraft, (ahem) Star Sonata, traveling, sports, German board games, ... The entertainment possibilities are endless. I think too many entertainment options is the problem, if anything.
- beshrkayali 13y agoOne can argue that too much entertainment is no entertainment really. I feel that we are yet to witness the effects of boredom on humanity.
- hatu 13y agoI agree, I think he was talking about way in the future when robots do all the work and unemployment stops being "unemployment".
- JonnieCache 13y agoThe entertainment "possibilities" are a symptom of the boredom.
- sillysaurus2 13y agoNote that this article is a lightweight edit of Asimov's original piece: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.html http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.h... In particular, the article is edited to only show you reasonable predictions, rather than all his predictions. I thought his mistakes were just as interesting, because they give us a window into what life was like in 1964. Asimov predicted that moon colonies would be common by now, for example. The overoptimism may have been due to the rate of technological growth leading up to 1964. On the other hand, perhaps it was due to the times. People were abuzz with the possibilities of the future partly because Kennedy had recently (1961) set a national goal of "landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth by the end of the 1960s." So it's pretty interesting to try to see the world through the eyes of someone 50 years ago and try to diff societal trends to the modern day. (It's also fun to imagine someone 50 years from now looking back on us. I wonder which of our societal trends will survive 50 years? It's an interesting game to try to figure out which of our current beliefs are crazy even though no one presently thinks so.) There are many interesting aspects of Asimov's piece, so it's well worth the read. For example, does this point about future societies sound familiar? "The situation will have been made the more serious by the advances of automation. The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders." He's mistaken about 2014, but only time will tell whether this is temporary. I was also surprised that there were fewer than half as many people in 1964 than 2014. Asimov mentioned that the population is predicted to double every 40 years. I wonder it that's still the case, or if growth has slowed?
- thelettere 13y agoPopulation growth has slowed fairly dramatically and for most of the 90's the concern was underpopulation, based on the finding that as economies develop fertility drops. It's called the fertility transition (1), and the current below replacement fertility in countries like Spain and a few others were seen as the future. For a while the US was thought to be exempt from this trend, but recent headlines suggest otherwise (2). (1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition (2) http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/06/news/economy/birth-rate-low/ http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/06/news/economy/birth-rate-low/
- hrkristian 13y agoThat is probably the best prediction I've seen anyone do. He greatly overestimated our capability to store/generate power, the reason is apparent in his Foundation series as what he got wrong (cordless appliances and hovering transportation) basically comes down to this; we don't have miniature nuclear fusion devices. Well, actually we do, they just aren't commercially viable to the extent you'll see them in a blender, yet. I don't know if our most beloved word is "Work!", "Growth!" seems more applicable to the western world, the two are tied pretty close together, though. Very interestingly our foray into holographic projection so far is in fact just as he describes them: fully transparent cubes where an image is rendered.
- ZoF 13y agoWhat small fusion devices do you speak of? Or did you mean fission?
- deletes 13y agoAll 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. I wish that was the case.
- pizza 13y agoI think it's slowly becoming the consensus that computer science is a practical skill that children can pick up with moderate ease, and I can only imagine interest will increase in the future..
- derleth 13y agoHow often do the programmers around here need binary arithmetic? Not very often, I'd wager. Even the people who do low-level programming use logic and decimal arithmetic more than actual binary arithmetic. It's almost as funny as Heinlein just assuming that every computer expert would need to have tools to repair hardware. He never quite wrapped his mind around someone focusing exclusively on software; maybe he never grasped 'software' as a distinct concept.
- deletes 13y agoComputer technology covers both software and hardware, and in the latter binary arithmetic must be mastered. For others it is good to understand the fundamentals so in that 0.01 percent of cases you know what are you doing. A general CS class in universities includes it, I was though how to multiply floats, but yes it is mostly not used.
- ricardobeat 13y agoPrevious discussion (3 months ago), with a list of correct/failed predictions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6287340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6287340
- schappim 13y agoAsimov's predictions: “Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare ‘automeals,’ heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be ‘ordered’ the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning.” “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. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica.” “[M]en will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button.” “Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.” “The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes.” “[H]ighways … in the more advanced sections of the world will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground.” “[V]ehicles with ‘Robot-brains’ … can be set for particular destinations … that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver.” “[W]all screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible.” “[T]he world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000.” And later he warns that if the population growth continues unchecked, “All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that!” As a result, “There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect.” [See our Walt Disney Family Planning cartoon from earlier this week.] “Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be ‘farms’ turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors.” “The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction…. 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.” “[M]ankind 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.” ”[T]he most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!” in our ”a society of enforced leisure.”
- YokoZar 13y ago"For that matter, you will be able to reach someone at the moon colonies, concerning which General Motors puts on a display of impressive vehicles (in model form) with large soft tires intended to negotiate the uneven terrain that may exist on our natural satellite." I'm not sure what I find more quaint: moon colonies or General Motors making impressive vehicles.
- ahomescu1 13y agoI found this one funny: “Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be ‘farms’ turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors.” Reminds me of Soylent Green (wasn't the original Soylent in the movie supposed to be processed algae?)
- huxley 13y agoNot in the movie, in the book ('Make Room! Make Room!') by Harry Harrison which inspired the movie
- morgante 13y agoSlightly off topic, but it's fascinating to me that we're not seeing any of the major effects of overpopulation that Harrison imagined despite having surpassed the numbers in his book. Maybe the Green Revolution? Or the realization that not everyone in the world has to live in New York City.
- derleth 13y agoPredicting food shortages, particularly of meat, was commonplace then, and increasingly common through the 1970s. Housing shortages were another theme, as was endless billowing torrents of acid rain. Turns out, the EPA actually did its job on that front and headed off a disaster in this country.
- taitems 13y agoThis formed a large part of Asimov's Robot series, with the first being "The Caves of Steel". To support a "huge" world population (roughly equal to our current size) food rations are cultivated in yeast farms outside the city domes.
- hatu 13y agoHis prediction about cities being underground too. I guess it makes sense he would write fiction about his favorite ideas.
- smsm42 13y agoOne of the funny things is the video-phone. The technology is there for years, and we can't really say we don't do it at all - we do it sometimes. But mostly we don't - not because technology is not there but because it turned out it's not that great an idea after all. Turns out in most of the situations we don't actually need the video and voice only is good enough. It is fascinating how many people didn't think it would be the case.
- sd8f9iu 13y agoI didn't realize at first that we had basically accomplished video-phones via Skype, Hangouts, and the internet. Seeing video chat was not very surprising for me, perhaps because it was such an obvious extension of the internet. It's funny how something that I had dreamed of as a kid, and always imagined as a dedicated hardware unit, became completely trivialized and overshadowed by the internet.
- minutetominute 13y agoInfinite Jest actually covers this topic in a really comical way. The author talks about how people dislike the way they look on the video phones and therefore begin to wear masks that look like made-up versions of themselves. Eventually, they start putting up little pictures of themselves instead of actually attending to the video call, and video phones basically return to voice phones with a picture.
- smsm42 13y agoGoogle Hangouts conveniently offers you an option to do that, among other things :)
- naboavida84 13y agoMore than not needing, people don't want video in most situations. I remember people saying: "how could I tell to my wife that im at work and not at the bar?" This is how innovation works in terms of reference dependence, we weight the new features versus the previous ones and decide if there is a gain, or several. Additionaly, loss aversion will be included in the formula and make it harder to change.
- dylandrop 13y ago"There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground." Curious as to why there is such an obsession with hovering vehicles in pop culture depictions in the future. It seems cool but that it would be inefficient even if we did develop it. (Using a crapload of power to suspend a heavy vehicle when it could be sitting on the ground just doesn't make much sense to me.)
- kisielk 13y agoWell, we do have maglev trains such as the ones in Shanghai. I could be wrong but I think the main benefit is the vehicle doesn't need to overcome rolling resistance, making it easier to accelerate and allowing faster travel.
- hengheng 13y agoIt's lateral and vertical acceleration. You'd have to build rail tracks and roads surprisingly flat and straight to travel across them at above 100 m/s (200mph, 300 km/h). We're talking lateral accelerations of 5-10m/s², or above 0.5g. This can be achieved with very well maintained tracks only, which is a second limit to high speeds besides high power consumption. There was some discussion about this when Elon Musk published his railway ideas.
- ryusage 13y agoBecause it looks so much cooler. And you never have to worry about bumpy roads or rocks or any of that ever again. You can go over water like it's nothing! It's something that seems amazing but not completely impossible. When people romanticize this idea, they're never thinking about efficiency or practicality. Only how cool it seems. Video phone calls are the same thing. As someone else pointed out here, the idea of it seems really cool and amazing. But we've had that ability now for years, and it turns out: it's actually less convenient and efficient than just sending a simple little text message. So it doesn't get used a lot.
- alexvr 13y agoHe's spot-on about robots: Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.
- redthrowaway 13y agoI'm always fascinated when reading articles like this that no one predicted general purpose or networked computers, or the implications thereof. It's always a gadget for this and a gadget for that, but never a gadget for everything that communicates instantaneously with every other gadget for everything on Earth. It speaks to the limits that the society around us places on our imagination -- these things were, quite literally, unthinkable.
- notdang 13y agoIn an interview Asimov said that the humanity had the opportunity to explore the space, but got advertisement managers and iphones instead. Update. I am terrible sorry, it was in Ray Bradbury's interview.
- simonh 13y agoEven SF authors and thinkers familiar with computer technology missed the possibility of a truly open and universally accessible networked platform. The closest I'm aware of was Jerry Pournelle's prediction that people would subscribe to 'Information Utilities'. I suppose you could argue that Google and Facebook are information utilities of a kind, but not at all in the way that he described them. Another technology I'm not really aware of any SF authors or futurists predicting in any meaningful way is autonomous aerial drones. It now looks like these things will eventually be everywhere handling postal deliveries, emergency response and surveillance. If you'd asked a cross section of computer technologists in the 70s how long they thought Moore's Law would last, I wonder what they'd have said.
- jrockway 13y ago“The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes.” I guess lithium doesn't decay very quickly. What's interesting is that we didn't really make batteries much better: we made things use less power. I am still looking forward to a wireless tea kettle, however.
- sigsergv 13y agoWell, predictions are always inaccurate, there is also some kind of current-time-bias. For example, people in later 18 century believed that in the future all carriages will move without horses, literally: usual 18 c. carriages that moves by itself. And no one predicted automobile as we know it today (since 192* it hasn't changed conceptually). So all these predictions are not came true at all, their authors dreamed of absolutely different things (except ideal concepts like “total boredom” for example).
- bluejes 13y agoFriends, countrymen, fellow young republicans, let's hear it for the 400-year old radicals.
- broabprobe 13y agoIt's Asimov's (and my) birthday today! :)
- dmiladinov 13y ago> "...heating water and converting it to coffee" Spot on! What, oh what, would I ever do without my Keurig machine!!!
- ctdonath 13y agoThe problem with most such predictions isn't the technology but the social side effects; we are capable of fulfilling the prediction, but don't want to. Ex.: nuclear batteries are entirely doable, but the word "nuclear" has been demonized. Ex.: breakfast-making robots are possible, but we just don't want them.