The World Fair of 2014 According To Asimov (From 1964) 352
Esther Schindler writes "If you ever needed evidence that Isaac Asimov was a genius at extrapolating future technology from limited data, you'll enjoy this 1964 article in which he predicts what we'll see at the 2014 world's fair. For instance: "Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the "brains" of robots. In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World's Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaid*large, clumsy, slow- moving but capable of general picking-up, arranging, cleaning and manipulation of various appliances. It will undoubtedly amuse the fairgoers to scatter debris over the floor in order to see the robot lumberingly remove it and classify it into 'throw away' and 'set aside.' (Robots for gardening work will also have made their appearance.)" It's really fun (and sometimes sigh-inducing) to see where he was accurate and where he wasn't. And, of course, the whole notion that we'd have a world's fair is among the inaccurate predictions."
Did he ever revisit these predictions? (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering Asimov did not die until the early nineties, did he ever update or evaluate the progress towards his earlier predictions? I feel he would have revised his belief that, for instance, mankind would be increasingly interested in living in hermetically sealed, controlled bubbles.
Why even classify? (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the hardest part. We have robots that are quite agile, but classifying objects into 'throw away' and 'set aside' is still extremely difficult.
I think there are plenty of other harder parts because I don't care if a robot can do that. Just a simple robot that could dust every item on a shelf would be fantastic. Heck, even if it could just lift any arbitrary item and clean only the shelf it would be fantastic.
The ability to lift and replace arbitrary items on a crowded shelf would seem to be pretty hard all by itself, without any need of classifying them...
Wonder why the dislike of sunlight (Score:4, Interesting)
The oddest part of the whole thing to me, was the thought that so many people would want to get rid of sunlight to the greatest extent possible.
The opposite has been true, luxury houses all have huge windows. People love natural light indoors, and a lot of money is spent trying to replicate it with artificial lighting...
I wonder if that was a prevailing opinion at the time, or if it was just something Asimov preferred.
Asimov (Score:5, Interesting)
This is one of the reasons I like to read Asimov's work. It's not (completely) wild imagination - there's actually some thought into whether things are reasonable.
My favorite Asimov invention that actually came to be is "Psychohistory": The kinds of big data analysis that we can do today are pretty much exactly what he's talking about. I worked on a project recently about predicting the behavior of Indian terrorist groups like the Lashkar-e-taiba and the Mujahadeen based on the last 20 years of the actions they've done and the things that have happened in their environment. There were some things we were able to predict about future behavior with accuracy as good as 90%."
Re:Pocket Computers (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently wrote a series of blogs analyzing Asimov's use of technology (esp. hyperspace and calculating jumps) in the original Foundation trilogy. The best it gets in the 3rd book is to have a room-sized computer that can project a picture of the galaxy and locate your position in space in only a half-hour ("the Lens"). Probably the two most jarring elements when re-reading these books is how all communication is still done on paper (stacks of paperwork, paper capsules for secure messaging, paper star charts for navigation), and that most everyone is smoking everywhere all the time. Follow-up would be the absence of women in any leadership or technical roles. This being set 50,000 years in the future.
http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2013/07/scifi-saturday-asimov-on-hyperspace-pt-4.html [blogspot.com]
Lumbering cleaner robot? (Score:4, Interesting)
Jetsons ran from 63-64. Asimov's predictions were from 64. So did Asimov get a kick out of Rosie? Heh. There's not enough information available to know this, but that's the first thing I thought of.
Re:One thing is for certain... (Score:5, Interesting)
He did mention flying cars, but he got a lot of stuff right, too! Here's a tally.
Yes:
Photosensitive windows that block out extreme light levels (well, usually sunglasses)
Automatically prepared meals (sort of, in microwave dinners; there's no standard for automated scanning of cooking times yet)
Machine language translation (this is still a big thing; Microsoft had a pretty big demo just a year or two ago—but, of course, the game's all about Chinese now)
Large solar arrays
Heavy dependence on nuclear (although not as much as he hoped)
Automated driving (definitely show-off material, if not on the market much)
Video calls (still not as popular as futurists want them to be)
Satellite networking
Mostly-automated road construction
Still no manned missions to Mars
Optical networking (although he thought it'd be through pipes and not glass fibres)
Bus rapid transit (special lanes on highways)
Earth's population over 6.5 billion
US population around 350 million (actually 319)
Less developed areas will have slipped further behind the well-developed ones (although he didn't realise that some of them would actually fall backward)
Life expectancies around 85 in some countries (82.59 in Japan)
Slowing population growth (it peaked in the 60s)
Creative industries amongst the most valued ("The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.")
No:
Windows will be archaic replaced with ubiquitous light panels (apparently scenery had no appeal in 1964)
Cities will move underground so that the surface can be parks and farms.
Automatically prepared meals (he gave the example of ordering bacon, eggs, and coffee prepared in the usual manner)
Clumsy robot housekeepers (long live the Roomba—although the general spirit of the robot obsession is going strong in Japan, a land apparently unravaged by the Terminator franchise)
3D movies (on holographic cube TVs)
Radioisotope batteries in consumer electronics
FLYING CARS (well, actually hovering ones—but seriously, why?)
Outdoor moving sidewalks in cities
Heavy use of compressed air tubes for postal mail (these remain only used in special settings like moving samples around hospitals, although my supermarket has one for money, weirdly)
No parking on the street (well, except on big mainstreets, but that was common even in his day)
MOON COLONIES
Line-of-sight laser communications would be preferable to cable conduits (?!)
Boston and Washington DC will have merged into a giant city with 40 million inhabitants
Higher population in deserts and the Arctic due to population explosion (high-rises were apparently unanticipated)
Underwater housing
Attempts to sell yeast and algae as food sources (we have real tubesteak now, thank you very much)
Widespread birth control efforts (only in China, I think?)
All high school students will be able to program
Automation of all automatable jobs (going so far as to eliminate classroom teaching, apparently)
Psychiatry the most important medical specialty (due to boredom caused by automation—apparently we'll all be unemployed in about four months)
And I'm not really sure how to classify this one:
Indeed, the most somber speculation I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!
So on the whole, about 50-50, mostly small things. There are some items in there that I thought were rather unexpectedly good (no manned Mars visits), but for the most part it seems we'll have to file this batch of Asimov's predictions as over-optimistic, with most other futurist forecasts.
As someone who didn't grow up being promised flying cars, I have to wonder why (other than "because they're cool" and/or
Re:and yet (Score:4, Interesting)
Which leads to an interesting piece of economics that the writers of the time, most all versed in economics, seemed to miss. That we will pay for things, like cable, but not for things like a autonomous vacuum cleaner or lawn mower. That as long as people are willing to work cheaper than a machine, we will pay the people.
Re:and yet (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll be happy with an arm on a ceiling-mounted gantry that retracts into a niche above the bath-shower alcove and keeps the toilet nice and sparkly clean, including the unspeakably nasty region BEHIND the toilet.
Somebody tell me again why it's impossible to buy a house in America with master bathroom that's built like a big waterproof shower with floor drain, so you can just hose it down with soapy water to clean it? Oh, right... because our building codes force you to use P traps and dry-venting for every single drain in the house, instead of allowing drum traps for floor drains (building a floor drain with a drum trap is cheap and easy; P-traps intrude into the ceiling envelope of the floor below, and dry-venting a floor drain that's in the middle of the room in a code-compliant manner is hard due to the horizontal distance it has to run before going vertical).