
Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014 - beshrkayali
http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/isaac-asimov-predicts-what-the-world-will-look-in-2014.html
======
sillysaurus2
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.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.html)

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?

~~~
barrkel
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.

~~~
tcbawo
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
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.

~~~
BrandonMarc
"Having to decide" assumes we'll be given a choice in the first place.
Technological advances have a mind of their own, as it were, and simply
deciding not to be affected by them is not a strategy.

Over a century ago, stop signs and traffic lights were optional for some
locations / situations / vehicles, and traveling long distance without using
roads was permissible. Now, whether you choose to use a car or not, you must
obey traffic laws or else. You don't get a choice in the matter.

Kevin Kelly wrote pretty well about this, a few years back:

[http://kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/02/the_unabomber_w.p...](http://kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/02/the_unabomber_w.php)

~~~
corin_
Society did decide about traffic laws, just not you as an individual.

------
JeffL
A 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.

~~~
JonnieCache
The entertainment "possibilities" are a symptom of the boredom.

~~~
acuozzo
And, in some cases, the cause; paradox-of-choice and all that.

~~~
dahlberg
For those interested:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...](http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html)

One of my favorite TED videos.

------
unfunco
The 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.

~~~
11thEarlOfMar
Here 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
My 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.

~~~
pavlov
I don't know, it seems to me that such an "emotion scanner" is a long way off.

Today we still don't understand pain, the most basic neurological response,
very much at all. Millions of people suffer from fibromyalgia, chronic pain
whose exact cause is unknown. We don't even know if fibromyalgia is primarily
of mental origin. If we can't measure pain and trace its origins, how are we
ever going to get a quantifiable, actionable answer to "how do you feel"?

Maybe there will be a breakthrough that will solve these problems in one swoop
-- sort of like the emergence of digital computing solved humanity's
communications challenges almost as a convenient byproduct.

------
smsm42
One 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.

~~~
minutetominute
Infinite 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
Google Hangouts conveniently offers you an option to do that, among other
things :)

------
dylandrop
"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
Well, 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
It'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.

------
ricardobeat
Previous 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)

------
adamnemecek
Some 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."

~~~
The_Double
10/22/2013 NASA Laser Communication System Sets Record with Data Transmissions
to and from Moon

[http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/october/nasa-laser-
communicat...](http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/october/nasa-laser-
communication-system-sets-record-with-data-transmissions-to-and-from/)

~~~
mturmon
Thanks 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.

------
redthrowaway
I'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_.

~~~
simonh
Even 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.

------
edward
I 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
I 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
Not RTG-based, but still a seriously proposed concept
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon)

------
ctdonath
The 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.

------
deletes
_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._

I wish that was the case.

~~~
derleth
How 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
Computer 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.

------
hrkristian
That 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
What small fusion devices do you speak of? Or did you mean fission?

------
sigsergv
Well, 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).

------
YokoZar
_" 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.

~~~
MrMan
I have a GM vehicle and I love it.

~~~
YokoZar
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it probably isn't moon-capable.

------
jrockway
_“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.

------
ahomescu1
I 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?)

~~~
taitems
This 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
His prediction about cities being underground too. I guess it makes sense he
would write fiction about his favorite ideas.

------
alexvr
He's spot-on about robots: _Robots will neither be common nor very good in
2014, but they will be in existence._

------
dmiladinov
> "...heating water and converting it to coffee"

Spot on! What, oh what, would I ever do without my Keurig machine!!!

------
broabprobe
It's Asimov's (and my) birthday today! :)

------
schappim
Asimov'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.”

