Tuesday 27 May 2014

From the World’s Fair: Isaac Asimov’s Predictions for 2014

The World’s Fair of 1964 was a spectacular showcase of mid-twentieth Century culture and technology, and the third such event to be held in the city of New York. It ran for two six-month seasons, April–October 1964 and April-October 1965. Admission cost $2 for adults and $1 for children. 1964 was the height of the Cold War between East and West, and so it was fitting that the theme of the Fair was ‘Peace through Understanding’. It also came at a time in the history of the US when the economy was booming, post-war consumerism was on the up and up, the Space Race was just getting off the starting blocks, and US citizens were hungry for consumer goods, technology and gadgetry.  More than 51 million people attended the fair, and one of them was the author Isaac Asimov.
The World's Fair, 1964

Asimov was a professor of biochemistry at Boston University, and a successful and popular author, who in his lifetime wrote over five hundred books.  He was best known for his science fiction works including the Foundation and Robot Series, and for his influential ideas about the future of society.  
For the purposes of this blog, I think we can safely say that qualifies him as a Geek.

On August 16, 1964 the New York Times published an article by him based on his visit, called Visit to the World’s Fair of 1964, in which he makes some interesting predictions about the year 2014. His predictions were largely inspired by the General Electric Pavilion, which had exhibits showing what life was like in 1900, 1920, 1940 and 1960. They got him wondering how things would be another fifty years in the future, in 2014. It is now 2014; we are living in the future imagined by Isaac Asimov. What was his vision and did he get it right?

The Predictions

1. The Home Environment
His first prediction was a general withdrawal from Nature, with mankind using technology to manipulate the environment to suit himself.  He thought that houses would be built underground to protect them from the vicissitudes of the weather; pollution could be filtered out, and the temperature and light levels would be artificially controlled. The inhabitants of 2014, he thought, would be freed from tedious routine jobs by machines and household gadgetry, including a fully-automated kitchen that would prepare all your food for you. Hmm, well, I do have some gadgets in my kitchen, like a dishwasher and a Magimix, but I am not entirely sure that they are actually labour-saving devices, and my 21st Century life is definitely not free from household drudgery.

2. Robots and Computers
I think I probably have a better chance at training my feckless better half to do something useful than of getting a household robot. Robots would be around, Asimov thought, but he predicted they would not be very good or very common. He was right there: think about lawn-mowing robots and the production line in a 21st Century car factory, for instance.  He noted that IBM had a stand dedicated to computers, and rightly speculated that in the future they would be much smarter and much smaller.
  

3. Energy
Isaac Asimov
I would give him full marks for saying that increased use of high-performance batteries will mean that electrical appliances will not need electric cords.  Tick! Energy: fusion power would still a long way off, he correctly thought. He was also correct in predicting the increasing importance of solar power, imagining large solar power stations springing up in desert and semi-desert regions such as Arizona, the Negev and Kazakhstan.


4. Transport
Regarding transportation, he did not quite get it right.  He envisaged that the car and other wheel-based modes of transport would be gradually phased out, and that the vehicles of 2014 would hover above the land or the sea, making traffic snarl-ups a thing of the past. If only he had been right on that one, my rush-hour commute to work would be a lot easier and would feature robot-driven cars and moving sidewalks. In 2014 compressed air tubes would carry goods and materials over local stretches, he said. Has Amazon thought of this one yet? Last thing I heard they were contemplating unmanned drones for their parcel delivery system, a truly terrifying prospect!

5. Communications
He had a glimpse of the power and proliferation of mobile devices, predicting that phones will be visual as well as audio, and that people will be able to use their phone screen for reading books, studying documents and viewing photos as well as for tele-visual phone calls.   Nice one Isaac. He thought we would be able to use the new-style phones to contact the colonies on the moon: wrong! Although, to be fair, if the US space program had continued with its lunar exploration and gone on to create colonies there, I am pretty sure we would have found a way to use our mobile phones to keep in touch with them.

6. Population Growth
He was right to predict that there would be a huge increase in world population levels (from around three billion in 1964 to well over seven billion today) but wrongly thought that this would force mankind to seek to colonise desert and polar regions, even under the oceans.

7. Social Inequality
He correctly predicted that the advanced technology of 2014 would not be available to most of the world’s poorer inhabitants.  In his own words:
Although technology will still keep up with population through 2014, it will be only through a supreme effort and with but partial success. Not all the world's population will enjoy the gadgetry 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. 

8. The Rise of Technology
He thought that technology would be so important that it would become the most important subject of study in schools:
Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction. Part of the General Electric exhibit today consists of a school of the future in which such present realities as closed-circuit TV and programmed tapes aid the teaching process. It is not only the techniques of teaching that will advance, however, but also the subject matter that will change. 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").
He was right: technology is given pre-eminence in our schools, but I think he failed to see how easy it would be to use computer technology.  For many of us it has become a fundamental and indispensable part of our everyday lives, even though most of us have not the slightest inkling about binary arithmetic or computer language such as FORTRAN.

9. Enforced Leisure and Boredom 
His greatest concern was that all that technology would make the people of the future unhealthy, lazy and bored:
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.
Indeed, the most sombre speculation I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!

Sorry Isaac; I can’t agree with you there: I have plenty of things to do with my leisure time that have nothing to do with robots, computers or gadgets, and there is still a lot more to 21st Century life than machine–tending, though I must admit I spend a lot of time worrying about keeping my Smartphone, Kindle and camera batteries charged up.

Nor did he predict the social and creative aspects of computer technology.  Think about all those social networks, all that photo-shopping, blogging and sharing: today we are obsessed with journalising, photographing, commenting, tweeting and sharing our lives, and today there are more outlets for human creativity than ever.  I must say, he was dead right about the predominance of psychiatric medicine, though happily this is more because of increased awareness of the importance of mental and emotional well-being than because of boredom.