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 o…
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
#72I 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
#73Earlier 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…
Re: Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014
#74One 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…
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.
Re: Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 f…
Look at what's going on in US public education with the move to Core Curriculum. The focus is on reading and math, with outcomes measured via computer based testing. You think when cash-strapped state legislatures realize they could reduce the number of teachers down to a single proctor watching over self-paced computer based instruction that they won't go for it, especially when "the test" (since that's what we're doing here... teaching to the test) is computer-delivered?
This isn't to say that teachers will go away anymore than retail clerks, or buggy-whip makers or barrel makers before them, will go away, but their ranks will thin and where they are employed will change. There will still be people willing to pay for personal instruction and there will still be courses that are difficult to deliver via CBT alone.
I always thought online / computer-based education, especially for grade school, sounded terrible. But once I saw how little my kids are actually getting in public school, and especially with federal meddling ala No Child Left Behind and Core Curriculum, I would actually embrace it - at least it would be self-paced and allow more advanced students to move ahead rather than sitting bored waiting on their peers.
Look what's happening at the university level with MOOCs already. That's only going to accelerate, and university professors are teachers by another name - maybe calling it "automation" isn't exactly right, but we'll certainly see a thinning of the ranks.
Re: Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014
#77Some 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…
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...
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.
Re: Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Re: Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014
#79I 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.
Re: Isaac Asimov Predicts in 1964 What the World Will Look Like in 2014
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…