TITLE: Asimov Sees 2014, Through Clear Eyes and Foggy
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: August 29, 2013 4:31 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
A couple of years ago, I wrote
Psychohistory, Economics, and AI,
in which I mentioned Isaac Asimov and one way that he had
influenced me. I never read Asimov or any other science fiction
expecting to find accurate predictions of future. What drew me
in was the romance of the stories, dreaming "what if?" for a
particular set of conditions. Ultimately, I was more interested
in the relationships among people under different technological
conditions than I was in the technology itself. Asimov was
especially good at creating conditions that generated compelling
human questions.
Some of the scenarios I read in Asimov's SF turned out to be
wildly wrong. The world today is already more different from
the 1950s than the world of the Foundation, set thousands of
years in the future. Others seem eerily on the mark.
Fortunately, accuracy is not the standard by which most of us
judge good science fiction.
But what of speculation about the near future? A colleague
recently sent me a link to
Visit to the World's Fair of 2014,
an article Asimov wrote in 1964 speculating about the world
fifty years hence. As I read it, I was struck by just how
far off he was in some ways, and by how close he was in others.
I'll let you read the story for yourself. Here are a few
selected passages that jumped out at me.
General Electric at the 2014 World's Fair will be showing 3-D
movies of its "Robot of the Future," neat and streamlined, its
cleaning appliances built in and performing all tasks briskly.
(There will be a three-hour wait in line to see the film, for
some things never change.)
3-D movies are now common. Housecleaning robots are not. And
while some crazed fans will stand in line for many hours to
see the latest comic-book blockbuster, going to a theater to
see a movie has become much less important part of the culture.
People stream movies into their homes and into their hands.
My daughter teases me for caring about the time any TV show or
movie starts. "It's on Hulu, Dad." If it's not on Hulu or
Netflix or the open web, does it even exist?
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.
There is no one on the moon with whom to converse. Sigh. The
rest of this passage sounds like fiber optics. Our world is
rapidly becoming wireless. If your device can't connect to the
world wireless web, does it even exist?
In many ways, the details of technology are actually harder to
predict correctly than the social, political, economic implications
of technological change. Consider:
Not all the world's population will enjoy the gadgety world of
the future to the full. A larger portion than today will be
deprived and although they may be better off, materially, than
today, they will be further behind when compared with the
advanced portions of the world. They will have moved backward,
relatively.
Spot on.
When my colleague sent me the link, he said, "The last couple of
paragraphs are especially relevant." They mention computer
programming and a couple of its effects on the world. In this
regard, Asimov's predictions meet with only partial success.
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" (from "formula translation").
The first part of this paragraph is becoming truer every day.
Many people husband computers and other machines as they do tasks
we used to do ourselves. The second part is, um, not true.
Relatively few people learn to program at all, let alone master
a programming language. And how many people understand
this t-shirt
without first receiving an impromptu lecture on the street?
Again, though, Asimov is perhaps closer on what technological
change means for people than on which particular technological
changes occur. In the next paragraph he says:
Even so, mankind 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.
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.
This is still speculation, but it is already more true than most
of us would prefer. How much truer will it be in a few years?
My daughters will live most of their lives post-2014. That
worries the old fogey in me a bit. But it excites me more. I
suspect that the next generation will figure the future out
better than mine, or the ones before mine, can predict it.
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PHOTO. Isaac Asimov, circa 1991. Britannica Online for
Kids. Web. 2013 August 29.
http://kids.britannica.com/comptons/art-136777.
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