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

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

#51

Post by sanoli »

polymathist wrote: post #34
11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 feeli…

I agree with you, except on the timescale. I'd say next 100 years. For your prediction to be right, we'd need a pretty good prototype of the 'brain cap/scanner' in about 20 years. I don't know if that's enough to be able to do this type of diagnosis, based of course on what we currently know.

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

#52

Post by DonGateley »

edward wrote: post #4

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.”

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.

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

#53

Post by dahlberg »

acuozzo wrote: post #21
JonnieCache wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

For those interested: http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...

One of my favorite TED videos.

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

#54

Post by derleth »

thelettere wrote: post #18
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #7

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,…

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 otherwi…

> 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.

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

#55

Post by derleth »

deletes wrote: post #20

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.

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.

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

#56

Post by derleth »

ahomescu1 wrote: post #39

I found this one funny: “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.” Reminds me of Soylent Green (wasn't the original Soylent in the movie supposed to be processed algae?)

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.

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

#57

Post by hengheng »

kisielk wrote: post #47
dylandrop wrote: post #42

"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 mu…

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.

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.

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

#58

Post by tcbawo »

barrkel wrote: post #25
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #7

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,…

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 machi…

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.

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

#59

Post by dredmorbius »

thelettere wrote: post #18
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #7

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,…

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 otherwi…

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

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

#60

Post by deletes »

derleth wrote: post #55
deletes wrote: post #20

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.

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…

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.
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