
How Isaac Asimov shaped robotics and space exploration and predicted the Internet - imartin2k
https://rossdawson.com/blog/best-futurists-ever-isaac-asimov-shaped-robotics-space-exploration-predicted-internet/
======
tzs
People always seem to focus on the things science fiction writers include in
the stories of the future.

Someone, I think it may have been Asimov, but it might have been Heinlein or
one of the other big names of that era, said that these are the least
important things that science fiction writers predict.

What is important, he said, was not the gadgets of the future, but how they
change us. Predicting ubiquitous robots or personal jetpacks would be like a
writer in 1880 predicting cars replacing horses.

Sure, cars replacing horses is interesting...but what is important is
predicting what the increased speed and range of cars over horses would do to
everyday life. What do cars do to teen and young adult dating habits, for
instance? With a car it is much easier to arrange a quick hook up with someone
away from the prying eyes of your parents. That could have big ramifications.

The future is more than just the present with nicer gadgets.

~~~
Cyph0n
Well said.

Great science fiction keeps the technology in the background and simply uses
it to further the story.

But excellent science fiction makes the plot so believable that the tech just
seems _natural_. My go-to example of such sci-fi is Solaris. I think it's much
harder to achieve this in a single novel because it's typically less annoying
to the reader when exposition is spread over multiple novels.

Examples of the former (in my opinion): Ender series, The Forever War,
Xenogenesis series, Contact, Nexus.

Examples of the latter: Red Rising, Foundation, The Expanse, Three Body
series, Ghost in the Shell (Japanese manga).

~~~
CodeMage
My favorite sci-fi and fantasy books are those that come up with a world
different from ours and then take that difference and explore its effects on
society. I'd like to offer some examples:

\- "Hello Summer, Goodbye" by Michael Coney

\- "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood (the first book in the Maddaddam
trilogy)

\- "The Fifth Season" by N. K. Jemisin (the first book in the Broken Earth
trilogy)

\- "The Mechanical" by Ian Tregillis (the first book in the Alchemy Wars
trilogy)

\- "Nexus" by Ramez Naam (the first book in the Nexus trilogy)

\- "Snow Crash" by Neal Stephenson

\- "Pandora's Star" by Peter F. Hamilton (part of the Commonwealth Saga)

\- "Hyperion" and "Fall of Hyperion" by Dan Simmons

\- "Lock In" by John Scalzi

\- "Blindsight" by Peter Watts

~~~
Cyph0n
Great list! I've read only a couple of them.

Hyperion was intriguing but Fall of Hyperion was too slow for my tastes.

Snowcrash was great. One of my favorite audiobook narrations too!

You might also like Malazan Book of the Fallen and Discworld. Malazan
especially is a masterpiece of world and history building.

Oh, and the Ghost in the Shell series would definitely be a great fit for you.
A good start would be the original animated film from the mid-90s. If you
enjoy that, jump to the anime Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

~~~
CodeMage
Thanks, I'm already a huge fan of Discworld, but I'll definitely give Malazan
a try!

------
colomon
This has the feel of having been written by an impressionable 20-something. In
1988, predicting "One essential thing would be a screen on which you could
display things, and another essential part would be a printing mechanism on
which things could be printed for you. And you’ll have to have a keyboard on
which you ask your questions’ although ideally I would like to see one that
could be activated by voice," was if anything badly retro. Everything he
mentions there except voice control was already a standard consumer product in
1988! And voice control was how the computers in Star Trek worked 20 years
earlier.

From 1964: "Complete lunches and dinners, with the food semiprepared, will be
stored in the freezer until ready for processing. I suspect, though, that even
in 2014 it will still be advisable to have a small corner in the kitchen unit
where the more individual meals can be prepared by hand, especially when
company is coming." Frozen TV dinners were a decade old when he wrote that.
And they don't even vaguely dominate the food market today in the way he
suggests they will. (If anything the big differences between 1964 and today
are much greater availability of fresh foods and eating out being much more
common.)

EVERYONE predicted video-phones back in the 60s -- hell, the Jetsons cartoon
beat him to the punch there by a couple of years! Generally, people predicted
they would be common much earlier than they actually were, and no one
predicted you'd carry them around in your pocket -- or be more likely to just
text a message than to use them.

For my money the most interesting predictions here are the ones where he
predicts things will go more slowly than most people at the time thought --
for instance, predicting man will have not walked on Mars in 2014 was
surprisingly conservative for an SF writer in 1964, but it was also dead
right.

~~~
ghaff
With respect to accessing information, the big "fail" in a lot of science
fiction of that general era is this assumption that the information source
would be this curated centralized repository--Encyclopedia Galactica in
Asimov's case but also see Niven/Pournelle Oath of Fealty, etc. Instead we
have Wikipedia, the web more broadly, etc. You see this assumption of
centralization, world government, etc. in a lot of other SF contexts as well.

~~~
opinali
Virtually all big science/tech projects from early 20th century were state
sponsored, so it was difficult for SF writers to imagine a future where
important innovation might come from the private sector or emerge from large
scale decentralized contributions. Frankly, this is still large true today if
you consider that lots of modern stuff comes from tech companies that are
becoming as rich and powerful as small nation states, so they can spare a few
billions in basic research with long-term or uncertain ROI.

And to be fair with Asimov, he saw some of that for example with
"U.S.Robotics", a fictitious private company that invented the positronic
brain and had a monopoly on that business. Also, his Encyclopedia Galactica is
the creation of a large group of "encyclopedists" who are basically academic
elites, something we could see as a Wikipedia-like except that it wasn't
produced by millions of joe schmoes but rather by a kind of priesthood of
professional intellectuals. (Foundation makes these people work in a
centralized organization, but that happens in a late period of the galactic
empire, it's my impression that the origins of the Encyclopedia are way more
descentralized.)

~~~
ghaff
Oh. I'm not faulting him. When he wrote his books, organizational models were
dominated by strict hierarchies whether government or assembly line-type
manufacturing companies. Even more collaborative academic research tended to
be dominated by big corporate labs and elite research universities. The
average person never interacted with mainframe computers directly and
information flow was largely mass market broadcast.

Absent any existing examples, the effects brought about by the modern
Internet, smartphones, collaborative open source software development,
generally less rigid organizational hierarchies, etc. would have been very
difficult to visualize. Indeed it would have seemed almost alien.

------
davedx
FYI: Asimov was in the news recently because SpaceX chose the first three
books from his Foundation Trilogy to launch into trans-Mars orbit aboard the
first Falcon Heavy.

[https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/2/6/16980538/spacex-
falco...](https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2018/2/6/16980538/spacex-falcon-heavy-
isaac-asimovs-foundation-series)

~~~
sizzzzlerz
As far as I'm concerned, there are only three books: the original trilogy that
he wrote in the 1940s. The sequels he wrote in the 80s have no where near the
charm or interest. They were written to capture the money from those who
fondly remember the original. I started reading Foundation's Edge and quickly
gave it up. I never bothered with the others.

~~~
the_af
The sequels are definitely weaker, but still worth reading. I enjoyed Prelude
to Foundation. I disliked Foundation's Edge because I didn't agree with the
fate of mankind as envisioned by Asimov :/

------
pferde
While the accuracy of the quoted prediction is uncanny, I would be interested
in reading Asimov's other, less accurate predictions. Those are usually quite
amusing - or sometimes sad, depending on how you feel about humanity putting
focus on wrong things.

~~~
teekert
Afaik those predictions relate mostly to nuclear power (main source power in
the Foundation trilogy), from the article linked in the post among others:

 _The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will
be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. The isotopes
will not be expensive for they will be by- products of the fission-power
plants which, by 2014, will be supplying well over half the power needs of
humanity. But once the isotype batteries are used up they will be disposed of
only through authorized agents of the manufacturer._

~~~
davedx
Hah. Interesting that he predicted large scale solar PV deployments too. (In
my mind, that's an even more impressive prediction given the state/cost of PV
tech in the 60's).

Even more interesting, I would say (though who knows) this power mix he
predicted (nuclear + solar) will be much closer to what we end up with on
Mars, which he also made predictions about.

~~~
eesmith
No, he didn't. You are reading too much into his prediction because you know
the outcome. He wrote:

"Large solar-power stations will also be in operation in a number of desert
and semi-desert areas -- Arizona, the Negev, Kazakhstan."

There's nothing in the prediction which implies that the solar power would be
based on PV. I think there's a higher likelihood he was thinking of
heliostats.

Solar One, a solar thermal power plant built in Mojave Desert, produced 10MW
of electricity back in the 1980s.

~~~
davedx
> I think there's a higher likelihood he was thinking of heliostats.

You mean CSP? Why do you think that? Silicon PV was available in the 1960's
and widely used in the space program. It's been around for longer than the
first CSP plant that was built 4 years after Asimov made his predictions in
1964. [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#cite_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#cite_note-21)

~~~
eesmith
Because solar power is older than that CSP. For example, Mouchot's work on
solar power in the the 1870s -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustin_Mouchot#Solar_researc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustin_Mouchot#Solar_research)
. His machine generated steam that could be used for mechanical power. At that
point it's trivial to produce electricity. It just won't be cheap electricity.

In 1941 Asimov wrote the short story "Reason", which took place in a solar
power satellite which beamed power down to Earth. He at this time wasn't
thinking about PV, because it didn't meaningfully exist, and the story only
talks about a "converter". (The station is also a mile across, and in solar
orbit.)

There's another SF book I read, probably written in the 1950s, about building
such a power plant in Earth orbit. It used a mirror to heat up material in its
focus to generate power. (One of the side plots of the story was that some TV
show was being filmed on the construction site, and the lead actor, in a space
suit, almost drifted through the invisible focus.) This is why I'm sure that
SF at the time didn't say that solar power stations had to be PV.

I looked around for something more definitive. In 1981 Asimov wrote "How Did
We Find About Solar Power", available at
[https://archive.org/stream/HowDidWeFindAboutSolarPower-
Engli...](https://archive.org/stream/HowDidWeFindAboutSolarPower-English-
IsaacAsimov/solarpix#page/n0/mode/2up) .

That booklet predicts PV use for the future. (It's also where I learned
specifically about Mouchot's work.) In the 1980s he know the cost of PV power
was growing ever cheaper.

What it doesn't answer is what Asimov thought in the 1960s.

He might simply have left it open, as he did in "Reason".

So, I could be wrong about my belief. But it's surely not obvious that Asimov
is specifically predicting PV over other possibilities that he reasonably know
about.

------
jeandejean
I love Asimov, but he predicted so many things that some ended true, some
didn't. It feels like people only see the bright side, and I understand why,
but come on, he said unrealistic things too, that were an extrapolation from
life in the 60s rather than an accurate prediction.

That being said, long live Isaac Asimov work, your books are amazing!

------
madengr
No one ever mentions the 0th law, which was probably the most important, at
least in the books.

Almost finished reading the entire Robot/Empire/Foundation series. That “I,
Robot” movie was garbage; absolutely nothing to do with the Robot series.

Just finished The Currents of Space. Pretty depressing, that (probably) 10k
years in the future, humans are still exploiting each other. Asimov probably
has it spot on.

~~~
boojing
I started binge reading Asimov's books in that order as well and I share you
sentiments. I guess that I liked the robot series more than Foundation since
the characters were more relatable.

~~~
arbie
The Seldon Plan is both the protagonist _and_ antagonist of the Foundation
trilogy. The human characters are merely incidental. A masterful achievement.

I see the beginnings of something similar with The Flow in The Collapsing
Empire.

------
mercer
Reminds me of ["The Machine Stops"][1] by E.M. Forster from 1909 that, from
what I remember, was even more uncanny in how it predicted social media and
whatnot.

[1]:
[http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html](http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html)

------
skookumchuck
The predictions of the internet in 1988 were hardly prophetic, since there
were already global computer networks in place at the time. Clarke predicted
the iphone in 1976 with the 'minisec' in "Imperial Earth". Hogan predicted the
internet in "The Genesis Machine" in 1978.

------
H4CK3RM4N
I'm amazed that this article skips over the fact that Asimov invented the term
"robotics", and co-opted "robot" for autonomous machines.

------
ncmncm
His influence on robotics has been mostly negative, although the mechanism has
been mostly journalistic stupidity. The "three laws" could never be
implemented in hardware, they were just rules about how to make stories.
"Suppose robots followed these. What would happen?" His answer was that they
would quietly take over the world and keep us as pets. Because nothing like
them could be implemented, there was no predictive value.

The actual outcome, without laws and with corporations standing in for the
robots, is that we are livestock and vermin, according to individual
usefulness and accidents of birth.

~~~
madengr
Why couldn't they be implemented in hardware? Through the whole Robot series
he describes them as "potentials" summing to force a decision, and even the
self-conceived 0th law takes precedence, though not for G.R. It's obvious the
positronic brain isn't based on logic, rather an analog brain with trillions
of "pathways" that can be "frozen" and never re-started (as you would a
program). There isn't even a concept of finite data storage. D.O. doesn't know
how long it will take to fill up his brain, though he records everything and
can't forget it. SPOILER: Though in the end of the Foundation series, we have
some clues.

~~~
mrob
The laws don't have any objective interpretation. What exactly is "harm" from
a mathematical point of view? This is good for storytelling, because it let
Asimov write stories about robots behaving in strange ways, and the
protagonists struggling to figure out how it made sense as a possible
interpretation of the laws, but it's no good for actually building robots.

~~~
krapp
Yes, people who take Asimov's laws seriously seem to forget that they _didn 't
even work in-universe,_ which was kind of the point.

------
Noos
He didn't shape much at all. Asimov was the literal definition of a hack; he
churned out writings more or less nonstop, and most of his work is nonfiction
and forgotten in time. His science fiction in general wasn't particularly that
good, and he's more of a prototype of Michael Crichton when you consider his
fiction; both managed to seize on a single idea that was striking, but were
unable to go beyond that idea with the rest of their output.

I read him growing up, too, even his David Starr and Norby books, and he never
really caught my attention. Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai Saga is a much better
version of the Foundation books, and for all of the love of the Three Laws of
Robotics, they really just were devices for science fiction versions of locked
room mysteries.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Ha! I can't stand the Dorsai stuff; Asimov rules. He inspired a generation to
harden their science, and make it pivotal to the science fiction story.

It takes all kinds.

~~~
Noos
How is his stuff hard science? He made up the positronic brain, and his whole
psychohistory was just absurd; if anything, the idea of a brilliant cabal of
scientists and technicians using psychohistory to predict the future is just
dressed up witchcraft than real science. Stuff like Nightfall is just
embarrassing.

Most of his science output was in a bunch of nonfiction books that I'm not
even sure are still in print, and he had a rep for churning out books on every
subject at lightning speed, rather than for great insight.

Dorsai and Dickson's stuff had issues too, but he was much better at writing
people as well as ideas, and he's had a longer, better overall career at
writing science fiction and fantasy. Asimov was probably the first household
name writer, but really needs to be viewed a lot more critically then the
fandom does.

~~~
eesmith
Who do you think wrote hard science fiction which didn't have its absurd
aspects?

Heinlein, writing about ESP, and FTL? Niven too, for that matter.

FWIW, Asimov's "Evidence" is listed as a representative example of hard
science fiction at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction)
.

