Isaac Asimov’s predictions from 50 years ago have gone viral. Brian Merchant pushes back on them:
Taken as a whole, Asimov’s vision for 2014 is wildly off. It’s just that ’Genius predicted the future 50 years ago’ makes for a great article hook. Asimov does hit a couple of his predictions pretty close to home: He ballparked the world population (6.5 billion); he anticipated automated cars (“vehicles with ‘robot brains’”); and he seems to have described the current smartphone/tablet craze (“sight-sound” telephones that “can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books.”)
But he also thought we’d have a colony on the moon, be living under a global population control regime, eating at multi-flavored algae bars, and letting machines prepare us personalized meals. Most divergent of all, he believed that increasing automatization of labor would spawn not inequality or joblessness, but spiritual malaise. … Asimov imagined that humanity would decide to distribute the wealth accrued by the automatons, and the problem wouldn’t be lost capital for workers, but lost meaning. Of course, in reality, it’s both—and therefore a much, much bleaker scenario.
Jerry Coyne points to the Internet as something Asimov didn’t see coming either:
[T]he world is becoming plugged in in a way Asimov simply couldn’t predict. When you walk down the street in an industrialized country, or ride in a plane or train, notice how many people are using their cellphones, iPads, iPods, or computers. Google Glass, the wearable computer, is next. This is the way the whole world will go. (My theory is that eventually the entire Earth will resemble New York City.) Connectivity has brought tremendous advantages: think of the ability to access information at your desk instead of a making a laborious trip to the library. And electronic journals and instant publication have markedly sped up the progress of science. Well, perhaps we won’t be as bored, but we may lose the skills of interpersonal communication.
Asimov made many other predictions. In general I think he did pretty well—certainly better than I would have—but it’s remarkable how many other people got stuff wrong, usually predicting a more technologically advanced or ideologically repressive society than we have now. Remember Nineteen Eighty Four (written in 1949), or The Jetsons cartoon series, which supposedly took place in 2062?
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