7 ms·

Note 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

Note 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 ago
Population 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/
- derleth 13y ago
  > for most of the 90's the concern was underpopulation Heh. When the birth rate is much above replacement, we worry about overpopulation. AND THAT'S TERRIBLE. When the birth rate is near or below replacement, we worry about underpopulation. AND THAT'S TERRIBLE. It wouldn't be nearly as funny if it weren't the same people worrying each time.
  - nwzpaperman 13y ago
    It would appear that fear sells and academics are more salesmen than would first appear, no?
  - Houshalter 13y ago
    Both are worrying. Overpopulation obviously has problems with dividing up natural resources among more and more people and/or trying to find jobs for them all. But too low birth rates mean there won't be enough kids to replace the current workers, and we will have fewer people supporting a larger population of retired people (though this might be possible with technology and of course, immigration.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  for most of the 90's the concern was underpopulation Among a rather select set of those interested in the subject. Yes, a great deal of fairly short-term (on a civilization/species perspective) issues arise when your birthrate suddenly falls, especially if it had previously been rising markedly. But concerns over the Earth's carrying capacity and how many humans can be supported, sustainably, and at what level of per-capita resource consumption (and hence, at what standard of living) are, without exaggeration, the single biggest challenge of the next 50-100 years. And all three factors come into play: population, per-capita resource consumption (PCRC), and sustainability. You can get a large sustainable population at a low level of PCRC. Do you really want a world of 10 billion living in the conditions of Kolkotta, Bombay, Manilla, or a Brazilian favela? You can get a large population and high PCRC ... but low sustainability. Do you really want modern technological civilization to run into a brick wall / off a cliff in 20, 40, 80 years? A fair number of people reading this can expect to be alive then. You can get a sustainable but smaller population at a higher PCRC. At which point the questions become, what's the minimal level of consumption you want to support, how many people can it support, and how do you get from n(0) to n(t) where t is the end of the transition period. History shows that periods of depopulation tend not to be particularly tranquil. For the HN twist: thinking about these sorts of problems seems rather more pertinent then trying to craft the next Uber for windsurfing or video ad pre-roll monetization scheme for Mexican K-Pop tweens. But the problem's hardly easy. A bit posted a few weeks back on how Kleiner-Perkins has stumbled in trying to pursue a green strategy struck me as immensely sobering. A business whose business is making money hand over fist over commercializing new ideas losing money hand over fist failing to commercialize on new ideas suggests that cracking this nut is going to be really, really fucking hard. And I sincerely believe John Doerr put his all into it. Watching him brought to tears is hard to watch: http://fixyt.com/watch?v=nuXJFbJNltg http://fixyt.com/watch?v=nuXJFbJNltg
nicholas73 13y ago
Technologically a moon colony isn't much a stretch from a space station. I think Asimov wasn't wrong about technology, but of politics and economics. NASA funding has long shrunk as a percentage of GDP since the 80s.
barrkel 13y ago
I'm of the opinion that SF is a poor place to look for predictions about the future, and that it is primarily about the present it's written in, a playground for changing the fundamental assumptions of that mundane present. But this one interests me: Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. I think, by and large, this is true in western society. We, here on this site, mostly tend to machines, giving them instructions, altering their potentials and adjusting their parameters, as Asimov might have said (he had a quite analog conception of automated thinking). Almost all the people I meet in a day tend to machines, except for binmen, mailmen, shelf stackers and the like - and they too have machinery that forms a greater or lesser part of their job.
- samstave 13y ago
  Funny though how your language makes the "non-machine tender" positions sound very robotic and machine-like: binmen, shelf-stackers, mailmen. All sound like roles easily ascribed to machines. In fact, my garbage man is a truck driven which has a giant hydrolic hand which grabs the bin and dumps it into the truck. The driver has to minimally tend to the mechanical arm only when the bin needs a slight relocation (moved away from a different class of bin) to allow his arm to grab the right bin.
- tcbawo 13y ago
  I had a conversation with some friends earlier this week regarding the reduction of labor due to automation and artificial intelligence. What happens to our society when our Walmarts and McDonalds stop needing a significant human workforce? My friend, who is a teacher, suggested that his field might be exempt from the trend. But, I imagine the purpose and methods of education will be radically different in the next few years/decades.
  - Tloewald 13y ago
    The question is, if walmart and macdonalds sre run by robots, who will their customers be? At some point we'll need to decide whether we're happy to be a society comprising a few shareholders in Mom's Friemdly Robot Company living in an fortified compound and a vast multitude of impoverished rabble foraging in the surrounding landfill.
rzimmerman 13y ago
His energy predictions are surprisingly good: And experimental fusion-power plant or two will already exist in 2014. (Even today, a small but genuine fusion explosion is demonstrated at frequent intervals in the G.E. exhibit at the 1964 fair.) Large solar-power stations will also be in operation in a number of desert and semi-desert areas -- Arizona, the Negev, Kazakhstan. In the more crowded, but cloudy and smoggy areas, solar power will be less practical. An exhibit at the 2014 fair will show models of power stations in space, collecting sunlight by means of huge parabolic focusing devices and radiating the energy thus collected down to earth. Especially considering how people always get a little overexcited about how close we are to nuclear fusion.
- dlsx 13y ago
  Except he seemed to be very excited about "long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes." Regardless, I consider his predictions to be the closest for his time.
jotm 13y ago
He wasn't wrong about automation: most routine jobs CAN be done better by machines, it's just that humans are cheaper and more flexible :)
thefallsman 13y ago
The world growth rate has slowed down some since the 60s, largely due to the economic modernizations someone mentioned earlier. The current doubling time is roughly 50 years - http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/human_pop/human_pop.html http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lect... As you can see here - http://www.zetterberg.org/Lectures/l96bTab/doubling.htm http://www.zetterberg.org/Lectures/l96bTab/doubling.htm. More industrialized regions have slower growth rates. Africa will double in just over 20 years while North America will double after over 100 years, for example. Many countries, like japan and Italy are finding their population is actually shrinking, this tends to be bad for economic reasons. The US gets a lot of population growth from immigrants which keeps the country growing despite having only about 2.0 children per family (2.1 is optimal for maintaining a steady population.)
- lotharbot 13y ago
  Asimov was working off a population model proposed by Malthus in 1798 [0], which has long been known to be flawed. It's not just industrial human populations that have slowing growth rates; most populations creatures have slowing growth rates as they near the population level the environment supports. The most common model for this is called "logistic growth" [1]. The "current doubling time" is kind of a misnomer -- it's how long it would take the population to double given the current growth rate, but the rate itself is also shrinking. Human population growth reached its peak (percentage-wise) in the early 1960s [2] and most credible estimates now have the world population leveling off in the 9-12 billion range (less than a full doubling from current levels) [3]. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Population http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Po... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_ecology:_modeling_population_growth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_ecology:_m... -- note that some populations follow very different trajectories in special circumstances. The Kaibab Deer are a rather tragic example: http://depts.alverno.edu/nsmt/youngcc/research/kaibab/story3.html http://depts.alverno.edu/nsmt/youngcc/research/kaibab/story3... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_population_growth_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_populat... - see also http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil_files/image004.gif http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil_files/image... , which is taken from the article http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil.htm http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil.htm [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growt...
caprad 13y ago
> 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. I think it is more likely a sad indication of how we have moved away from spending money on space exploration, and instead spending it elsewhere. We certainly could have moon bases if we had continued spending and researching into space.
- Tloewald 13y ago
  We could have moonbases but what use would they be? In general any futurist has been ridiculously optimistic about energy generation/storage, robots, and transportation, and hopelessly pessimistic about (or even oblivious to) computers, communication, and anything biological (except perhaps for sanguine predictions about curing cancer, ageing, or the common cold). Arthur C. Clarke, whose predictions are linked from the article, completely missed miniaturization. Asimov was one of the few who foresaw miniaturization but oddly, as a biologist, seemed completely oblivious to genetic engineering etc.
  - ijk 13y ago
    In general, futurists tends to overestimate trends from technologies that are at the middle of an s-curve and underestimate technologies at the beginning of the s-curve. I expect future predictions to shift along the same trends, overestimating trends that are currently skyrocketing. And of course, which technologies the futurist is personally familiar with can vary widely. Asimov, for example, had a blind spot for robots.
    - Tloewald 13y ago
      I'm not sure as a general observation the "s-curve" turns out to work that well. E.g. futurists have (with Kurzweil and his crowd a notable exception) consistently underestimated progress in computer capabilities even in the 80s and 90s when progress was insanely rapid, while over-estimating advances in AI (which is, optimistically, at the beginning of its s-curve). You could almost include Asimov in that. Similarly, Arthur C. Clarke was oblivious to miniaturization while living in the thick of it. I think one of the factors is romance -- SF writers want certain things to happen and just wish it into being, regardless of how plausible it really is (faster than light travel, time travel, anti-gravity, artificial gravity, laser pistols). On the reverse side they tend to ignore technologies that are either unromantic or make stories more complicated or seem to fight against cliched dramatic opportunities. (Fast travel adds to romance and drama, but fast communications detract from romance and drama.)
sytelus 13y ago
This is depressing. I can imagine if I was living in 1964, all these predictions would look very reasonable to come true in 50 years. That's a long time considering it took only 10 years to go to moon from pretty much nothing. Little would I know that world would quickly change so that (1) governments focuses on defense cutting down on science and space (2) corporations focuses on increasing profits and shareholder value cutting down on risky technological bets. World has produced lot more in terms of GDP than in 60s but our investment in science, research and technology bets haven't gone up in proportion. Looking forward to trends for next 50 years this only seem to getting worse. Governments are pretty much either bankrupt or would spend most of its resources for retirees or defense. Corporations would get even more vicious due to never ending expectation of that 10% increase in revenue each quarter. Most of these produces of human being would ultimately benefit few people to get even more rich instead of advancing science and technology. Those advances would eventually come through but the pace of it has been slown down so much that what is possible in 50 years would now be achieved in 200 years.
mathattack 13y ago
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. I think our current focus and bias will drive much of it. A lot of our worldview is apps, internet, computers and mobile devices. Most predictions will extrapolate this, perhaps with Moore's law. We'll probably miss the 1 or 2 huge leaps that will redefine society.
emwa 13y ago
Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with "Robot-brains" vehicles that can be set for particular destinations and that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver. Wow!

thelettere 13y ago

Population 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/

derleth 13y ago
> for most of the 90's the concern was underpopulation Heh. When the birth rate is much above replacement, we worry about overpopulation. AND THAT'S TERRIBLE. When the birth rate is near or below replacement, we worry about underpopulation. AND THAT'S TERRIBLE. It wouldn't be nearly as funny if it weren't the same people worrying each time.
- nwzpaperman 13y ago
  It would appear that fear sells and academics are more salesmen than would first appear, no?
- Houshalter 13y ago
  Both are worrying. Overpopulation obviously has problems with dividing up natural resources among more and more people and/or trying to find jobs for them all. But too low birth rates mean there won't be enough kids to replace the current workers, and we will have fewer people supporting a larger population of retired people (though this might be possible with technology and of course, immigration.
dredmorbius 13y ago
for most of the 90's the concern was underpopulation Among a rather select set of those interested in the subject. Yes, a great deal of fairly short-term (on a civilization/species perspective) issues arise when your birthrate suddenly falls, especially if it had previously been rising markedly. But concerns over the Earth's carrying capacity and how many humans can be supported, sustainably, and at what level of per-capita resource consumption (and hence, at what standard of living) are, without exaggeration, the single biggest challenge of the next 50-100 years. And all three factors come into play: population, per-capita resource consumption (PCRC), and sustainability. You can get a large sustainable population at a low level of PCRC. Do you really want a world of 10 billion living in the conditions of Kolkotta, Bombay, Manilla, or a Brazilian favela? You can get a large population and high PCRC ... but low sustainability. Do you really want modern technological civilization to run into a brick wall / off a cliff in 20, 40, 80 years? A fair number of people reading this can expect to be alive then. You can get a sustainable but smaller population at a higher PCRC. At which point the questions become, what's the minimal level of consumption you want to support, how many people can it support, and how do you get from n(0) to n(t) where t is the end of the transition period. History shows that periods of depopulation tend not to be particularly tranquil. For the HN twist: thinking about these sorts of problems seems rather more pertinent then trying to craft the next Uber for windsurfing or video ad pre-roll monetization scheme for Mexican K-Pop tweens. But the problem's hardly easy. A bit posted a few weeks back on how Kleiner-Perkins has stumbled in trying to pursue a green strategy struck me as immensely sobering. A business whose business is making money hand over fist over commercializing new ideas losing money hand over fist failing to commercialize on new ideas suggests that cracking this nut is going to be really, really fucking hard. And I sincerely believe John Doerr put his all into it. Watching him brought to tears is hard to watch: http://fixyt.com/watch?v=nuXJFbJNltg http://fixyt.com/watch?v=nuXJFbJNltg

nicholas73 13y ago

Technologically a moon colony isn't much a stretch from a space station. I think Asimov wasn't wrong about technology, but of politics and economics. NASA funding has long shrunk as a percentage of GDP since the 80s.

barrkel 13y ago

I'm of the opinion that SF is a poor place to look for predictions about the future, and that it is primarily about the present it's written in, a playground for changing the fundamental assumptions of that mundane present. But this one interests me: Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. I think, by and large, this is true in western society. We, here on this site, mostly tend to machines, giving them instructions, altering their potentials and adjusting their parameters, as Asimov might have said (he had a quite analog conception of automated thinking). Almost all the people I meet in a day tend to machines, except for binmen, mailmen, shelf stackers and the like - and they too have machinery that forms a greater or lesser part of their job.

samstave 13y ago
Funny though how your language makes the "non-machine tender" positions sound very robotic and machine-like: binmen, shelf-stackers, mailmen. All sound like roles easily ascribed to machines. In fact, my garbage man is a truck driven which has a giant hydrolic hand which grabs the bin and dumps it into the truck. The driver has to minimally tend to the mechanical arm only when the bin needs a slight relocation (moved away from a different class of bin) to allow his arm to grab the right bin.
tcbawo 13y ago
I had a conversation with some friends earlier this week regarding the reduction of labor due to automation and artificial intelligence. What happens to our society when our Walmarts and McDonalds stop needing a significant human workforce? My friend, who is a teacher, suggested that his field might be exempt from the trend. But, I imagine the purpose and methods of education will be radically different in the next few years/decades.
- Tloewald 13y ago
  The question is, if walmart and macdonalds sre run by robots, who will their customers be? At some point we'll need to decide whether we're happy to be a society comprising a few shareholders in Mom's Friemdly Robot Company living in an fortified compound and a vast multitude of impoverished rabble foraging in the surrounding landfill.

rzimmerman 13y ago

His energy predictions are surprisingly good: And experimental fusion-power plant or two will already exist in 2014. (Even today, a small but genuine fusion explosion is demonstrated at frequent intervals in the G.E. exhibit at the 1964 fair.) Large solar-power stations will also be in operation in a number of desert and semi-desert areas -- Arizona, the Negev, Kazakhstan. In the more crowded, but cloudy and smoggy areas, solar power will be less practical. An exhibit at the 2014 fair will show models of power stations in space, collecting sunlight by means of huge parabolic focusing devices and radiating the energy thus collected down to earth. Especially considering how people always get a little overexcited about how close we are to nuclear fusion.

dlsx 13y ago
Except he seemed to be very excited about "long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes." Regardless, I consider his predictions to be the closest for his time.

jotm 13y ago

He wasn't wrong about automation: most routine jobs CAN be done better by machines, it's just that humans are cheaper and more flexible :)

thefallsman 13y ago

The world growth rate has slowed down some since the 60s, largely due to the economic modernizations someone mentioned earlier. The current doubling time is roughly 50 years - http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/human_pop/human_pop.html http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lect... As you can see here - http://www.zetterberg.org/Lectures/l96bTab/doubling.htm http://www.zetterberg.org/Lectures/l96bTab/doubling.htm. More industrialized regions have slower growth rates. Africa will double in just over 20 years while North America will double after over 100 years, for example. Many countries, like japan and Italy are finding their population is actually shrinking, this tends to be bad for economic reasons. The US gets a lot of population growth from immigrants which keeps the country growing despite having only about 2.0 children per family (2.1 is optimal for maintaining a steady population.)

lotharbot 13y ago
Asimov was working off a population model proposed by Malthus in 1798 [0], which has long been known to be flawed. It's not just industrial human populations that have slowing growth rates; most populations creatures have slowing growth rates as they near the population level the environment supports. The most common model for this is called "logistic growth" [1]. The "current doubling time" is kind of a misnomer -- it's how long it would take the population to double given the current growth rate, but the rate itself is also shrinking. Human population growth reached its peak (percentage-wise) in the early 1960s [2] and most credible estimates now have the world population leveling off in the 9-12 billion range (less than a full doubling from current levels) [3]. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Population http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Po... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_ecology:_modeling_population_growth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#In_ecology:_m... -- note that some populations follow very different trajectories in special circumstances. The Kaibab Deer are a rather tragic example: http://depts.alverno.edu/nsmt/youngcc/research/kaibab/story3.html http://depts.alverno.edu/nsmt/youngcc/research/kaibab/story3... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_population_growth_rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_populat... - see also http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil_files/image004.gif http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil_files/image... , which is taken from the article http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil.htm http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil.htm [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growt...

caprad 13y ago

> 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. I think it is more likely a sad indication of how we have moved away from spending money on space exploration, and instead spending it elsewhere. We certainly could have moon bases if we had continued spending and researching into space.

Tloewald 13y ago
We could have moonbases but what use would they be? In general any futurist has been ridiculously optimistic about energy generation/storage, robots, and transportation, and hopelessly pessimistic about (or even oblivious to) computers, communication, and anything biological (except perhaps for sanguine predictions about curing cancer, ageing, or the common cold). Arthur C. Clarke, whose predictions are linked from the article, completely missed miniaturization. Asimov was one of the few who foresaw miniaturization but oddly, as a biologist, seemed completely oblivious to genetic engineering etc.
- ijk 13y ago
  In general, futurists tends to overestimate trends from technologies that are at the middle of an s-curve and underestimate technologies at the beginning of the s-curve. I expect future predictions to shift along the same trends, overestimating trends that are currently skyrocketing. And of course, which technologies the futurist is personally familiar with can vary widely. Asimov, for example, had a blind spot for robots.
  - Tloewald 13y ago
    I'm not sure as a general observation the "s-curve" turns out to work that well. E.g. futurists have (with Kurzweil and his crowd a notable exception) consistently underestimated progress in computer capabilities even in the 80s and 90s when progress was insanely rapid, while over-estimating advances in AI (which is, optimistically, at the beginning of its s-curve). You could almost include Asimov in that. Similarly, Arthur C. Clarke was oblivious to miniaturization while living in the thick of it. I think one of the factors is romance -- SF writers want certain things to happen and just wish it into being, regardless of how plausible it really is (faster than light travel, time travel, anti-gravity, artificial gravity, laser pistols). On the reverse side they tend to ignore technologies that are either unromantic or make stories more complicated or seem to fight against cliched dramatic opportunities. (Fast travel adds to romance and drama, but fast communications detract from romance and drama.)

sytelus 13y ago

This is depressing. I can imagine if I was living in 1964, all these predictions would look very reasonable to come true in 50 years. That's a long time considering it took only 10 years to go to moon from pretty much nothing. Little would I know that world would quickly change so that (1) governments focuses on defense cutting down on science and space (2) corporations focuses on increasing profits and shareholder value cutting down on risky technological bets. World has produced lot more in terms of GDP than in 60s but our investment in science, research and technology bets haven't gone up in proportion. Looking forward to trends for next 50 years this only seem to getting worse. Governments are pretty much either bankrupt or would spend most of its resources for retirees or defense. Corporations would get even more vicious due to never ending expectation of that 10% increase in revenue each quarter. Most of these produces of human being would ultimately benefit few people to get even more rich instead of advancing science and technology. Those advances would eventually come through but the pace of it has been slown down so much that what is possible in 50 years would now be achieved in 200 years.

mathattack 13y ago

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. I think our current focus and bias will drive much of it. A lot of our worldview is apps, internet, computers and mobile devices. Most predictions will extrapolate this, perhaps with Moore's law. We'll probably miss the 1 or 2 huge leaps that will redefine society.

emwa 13y ago

Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with "Robot-brains" vehicles that can be set for particular destinations and that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver. Wow!