Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014

http://www.openculture.com/2014/01/isaac-asimov-predicts-what-the-world-will-look-in-2014.html

by beshrkayali • 13 years ago

237 116 13 years ago

openculture.com

adamnemecek2• 13 years ago

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."

thirsteh• 13 years ago

Hilarious? Sad, rather.

skaevola• 13 years ago

Funny because fiber optic cable have been in use for more than a decade?

JonnieCache3• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure that is exactly what does go on, dude. Apart from the living on the moon bit, obviously.

adamnemecek2• 13 years ago

I was specifically talking about the communication with moon. I find it funny how back in the day, futurologists were obsessed with it.

The_Double• 13 years ago

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...

mturmon• 13 years ago

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.

salient• 13 years ago

We have laser connection to the moon now, actually. And he was right about fiber optic cables, too.

edward• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

Not RTG-based, but still a seriously proposed concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon

polymathist2• 13 years ago

Wouldn't be surprised if something like that is coming soon. Maybe not radioisotopes exactly, but something. Battery technology has been one of the major bottlenecks in advancing electronics, mobile computing, and transportation. It's an area ripe for change, and the economic pressure/incentive is definitely there.

DonGateley3• 13 years ago

I look around me and see that everything to which a power cord is attached has evolved enormously since his prediction or didn't exist at all. Yet the cord remains as it was a couple centuries ago.

This has always amazed me and as I look at the incredible rats nest of them around me I do hope for a breakthrough.

ams6110• 13 years ago

A lot of things haven't changed at all. Televisions (apart from the screen itself), most kitchen and household appliances, all almost exactly as they were 50 years ago.

unfunco• 13 years ago

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.

kingkawn• 13 years ago

Psychiatry is coming.

11thEarlOfMar2• 13 years ago

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.

polymathist2• 13 years ago

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.

JeffL• 13 years ago

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.

beshrkayali• 13 years ago

One can argue that too much entertainment is no entertainment really. I feel that we are yet to witness the effects of boredom on humanity.

hatu3• 13 years ago

I agree, I think he was talking about way in the future when robots do all the work and unemployment stops being "unemployment".

JonnieCache3• 13 years ago

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

acuozzo• 13 years ago

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

Houshalter3• 13 years ago

I wouldn't say it's increased boredom. People still work about the same amount. It's just technology now makes video games and the like possible where they weren't before.

Houshalter3• 13 years ago

I'm worried about the increase in entertainment actually. Technology enables increasingly addictive games, and there is a large incentive to make them even more addicting and even more attractive, and find exploits in human psychology. Farmville is only the beginning.

sillysaurus2• 13 years ago

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...

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• 13 years 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

(2) http://money.cnn.com/2013/09/06/news/economy/birth-rate-low/

derleth3• 13 years 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.

dredmorbius3• 13 years 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

nicholas73• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

vidarh2• 13 years ago

But this one interests me: Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders.

But that is not a new prediction. Socialism for example came about in the mid 1800's on the basis of an optimistic view of what would be possible thanks to the industrial revolution - the idea that machines could put us in a position able to eradicate poverty - but also pessimism about how it would turn workers into cogs in a machine.

This latter view came to shape a a lot of thinking and art for decades. In the cinema there are many obvious examples, such as Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) to Charlie Chaplins "Modern Times" (1936).

The latter makes it literal: Chaplin goes crazy due to the monotonous, high speed work and horrible treatment (including being used as a guinea pig for a machine designed to feed the workers lunch more efficiently). He starts seeing everything, such as buttons, as machine parts and nuts and bolts, and keeps trying to fasten them.

Eventually he gets pulled into the machine he is tending to and is shown as being moved along by the giant cogs.

rzimmerman• 13 years 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.

jotm• 13 years 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• 13 years 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/lect...

As you can see here - 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• 13 years 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_Po...

[1] 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...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_growth#Human_populat... - see also http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil_files/image... , which is taken from the article http://www.growth-dynamics.com/articles/Kurzweil.htm

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growt...

caprad• 13 years 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.

Tloewald5• 13 years 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.

genwin• 13 years ago

I'd rather have more national parks than space exploration. But yeah, no pointless wars would be nice.

simonh2• 13 years ago

I am sure that's true, but the problem is that the costs of space exploration haven't gone down the way that e.g. the costs of air travel have gone down over the same period. That, combined with the fact that none of the expected advantages of manufacturing and research in space have panned out means that it turns out there's not much for people on a Moon base to usefully do and it's a lot more expensive than expected for them to do it.

If SpaceX actually does manage to crack efficient rocket re-useability that will certainly help with the cost side of things. The potential there is really exciting, but since there are plenty of uninhabited bare rocks on Earth for people to establish colonies on if they want to, it's still hard to see why they'd choose to do so on the Moon.

sytelus• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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!

hrkristian• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

deletes2• 13 years ago

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.

pizza• 13 years ago

I think it's slowly becoming the consensus that computer science is a practical skill that children can pick up with moderate ease, and I can only imagine interest will increase in the future..

derleth3• 13 years ago

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.

deletes2• 13 years ago

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.

ricardobeat• 13 years ago

Previous discussion (3 months ago), with a list of correct/failed predictions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6287340

schappim• 13 years ago

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.”

”[T]he most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!” in our ”a society of enforced leisure.”

YokoZar2• 13 years ago

"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• 13 years ago

I have a GM vehicle and I love it.

YokoZar2• 13 years ago

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

ahomescu1• 13 years ago

I found this one funny:

Reminds me of Soylent Green (wasn't the original Soylent in the movie supposed to be processed algae?)

huxley• 13 years ago

Not in the movie, in the book ('Make Room! Make Room!') by Harry Harrison which inspired the movie

morgante• 13 years ago

Slightly off topic, but it's fascinating to me that we're not seeing any of the major effects of overpopulation that Harrison imagined despite having surpassed the numbers in his book. Maybe the Green Revolution? Or the realization that not everyone in the world has to live in New York City.

derleth3• 13 years ago

Predicting food shortages, particularly of meat, was commonplace then, and increasingly common through the 1970s. Housing shortages were another theme, as was endless billowing torrents of acid rain. Turns out, the EPA actually did its job on that front and headed off a disaster in this country.

taitems• 13 years ago

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.

hatu3• 13 years ago

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

smsm422• 13 years ago

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.

sd8f9iu• 13 years ago

I didn't realize at first that we had basically accomplished video-phones via Skype, Hangouts, and the internet. Seeing video chat was not very surprising for me, perhaps because it was such an obvious extension of the internet. It's funny how something that I had dreamed of as a kid, and always imagined as a dedicated hardware unit, became completely trivialized and overshadowed by the internet.

minutetominute• 13 years ago

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.

smsm422• 13 years ago

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

naboavida84• 13 years ago

More than not needing, people don't want video in most situations. I remember people saying: "how could I tell to my wife that im at work and not at the bar?"

This is how innovation works in terms of reference dependence, we weight the new features versus the previous ones and decide if there is a gain, or several. Additionaly, loss aversion will be included in the formula and make it harder to change.

dylandrop• 13 years ago

"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• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

ryusage• 13 years ago

Because it looks so much cooler. And you never have to worry about bumpy roads or rocks or any of that ever again. You can go over water like it's nothing! It's something that seems amazing but not completely impossible.

When people romanticize this idea, they're never thinking about efficiency or practicality. Only how cool it seems.

Video phone calls are the same thing. As someone else pointed out here, the idea of it seems really cool and amazing. But we've had that ability now for years, and it turns out: it's actually less convenient and efficient than just sending a simple little text message. So it doesn't get used a lot.

alexvr• 13 years ago

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

redthrowaway• 13 years ago

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.

notdang• 13 years ago

In an interview Asimov said that the humanity had the opportunity to explore the space, but got advertisement managers and iphones instead.

Update. I am terrible sorry, it was in Ray Bradbury's interview.

simonh2• 13 years ago

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.

jrockway• 13 years ago

“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.

sigsergv• 13 years ago

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).

broabprobe• 13 years ago

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

dmiladinov• 13 years ago

"...heating water and converting it to coffee"

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

ctdonath• 13 years ago

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.

Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014

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