Isaac Asimov’s 1964 Predictions About What the World Will Look 50 Years Later

asimov throne

Paint­ing of Asi­mov on his throne by Rowe­na Morill

When New York City host­ed The World’s Fair in 1964, Isaac Asi­mov, the pro­lif­ic sci-fi author and pro­fes­sor of bio­chem­istry at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to won­der what the world would look like 50 years hence — assum­ing the world sur­vived the nuclear threats of the Cold War. Writ­ing in The New York Times, Asi­mov imag­ined a world that you might part­ly rec­og­nize today, a world where:

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

Isaac Asi­mov was­n’t the only per­son who peered into the future dur­ing the 60s and got it right. You can find a few more on-the-mark pre­dic­tions from con­tem­po­raries below:

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Wal­ter Cronkite Imag­ines the Home of the 21st Cen­tu­ry … Back in 1967

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

Mar­shall McLuhan Announces That The World is a Glob­al Vil­lage

via Buz­zfeed


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Comments (77)
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  • Enrique Vazquez says:

    How pow­er­ful and hum­ble a man becomes, when obser­va­tion becomes his norm, for we are crea­tures of habits, and thus our lifes can be fore­told. I dream of a day when we are who we tru­ly are. Thank you for shar­ing.

  • André Rodrigues says:

    “Robots will nei­ther be com­mon nor very good in 2014, but they will be in exis­tence.”

    This is my favorite, he was able to under­stand that his vision of intel­li­gent robots would take a very long time. Usu­al­ly with futur­ists, the prob­lem is that they think great things are right around the cor­ner, and bad things are still far away in the future (like over­pop­u­la­tion).

  • Patrick Murphy says:

    “[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.”
    How very pre­scient of Isaac when we see today August 2014 that the DSM 5 has been pub­lished and it has expand­ed to include many more sep­a­rate diag­noses of ill­ness­es than that edi­tion of 30 years ago.…

    • Unlicensed Dremel says:

      He actu­al­ly could­n’t pos­si­bly have been more dead wrong about bore­dom.… quite the oppo­site — more things to do than ever before; but the men­tal ill­ness part is right, pre­cise­ly because of the over­whelm­ing com­plex­i­ty and over­whelm­ing choic­es the world offers.

  • john durcan says:

    hux­ley

  • PacificSage says:

    I don’t think he got it ‘right’ at all.

    His last sentence…”[T]he most glo­ri­ous sin­gle word in the vocab­u­lary will have become work!” in our ”a soci­ety of enforced leisure.”…Really? If being laid off work, being unem­ployed, up to your eyes in debt is leisure ten yes, he got it right.

    Mr Asi­mov is a bril­liant tech­ni­cian and a great writer, but I don’t think he every antic­i­pat­ed how patho­log­i­cal the finan­cial indus­try would become, and how they would sell out the future for the sake of hav­ing a few thou­sand bil­lion­aires. His dis­tant future (the one in h1s mind) will nev­er be built. It will nev­er be financed.

    • Andy Adams says:

      For a fur­ther enlight­en­ment on “how patho­log­i­cal the finan­cial indus­try would become…” may I sug­gest a good read for you, “Snakes in Suits” Dr. Robert Hare is a co-author I believe. About when psy­chopaths go to work; then you will tru­ly under­stand the incor­ri­gi­ble nature of the entire present sys­tem — it is an advanced state of decay.

  • Dave Juliette says:

    This was an inter­est­ing piece until at the very end when you make the fan­tas­tic state­ment, “Isaac Asi­mov wasn’t the only per­son who peered into the future dur­ing the 60s and got it right.”

    “Got it right?” What exact­ly can you mean by that?

    Where are the “automeals” that can be “ordered the night before?” And the “elec­tro­lu­mi­nes­cent pan­els” that he thinks will be ubiq­ui­tous, light­ing up our homes “in a vari­ety of col­ors?”

    Speak­ing of ubiq­ui­ty, robot­ics is quite com­mon­place today in man­u­fac­tur­ing world­wide (to name just one exam­ple), and the sci­ence has pro­duced units that are quite “good”.

    And while your iPhone and your lap­top run on bat­ter­ies (albeit not ones “run­ning on iso­topes”), the fact is that most appli­ances (includ­ing your pre­cious Keurig”) still depend on the grid for their pow­er.

    And while there has been a lot of talk from Google about cars that will dri­ve them­selves, we’re still some decades away from that tech­nol­o­gy fil­ter­ing down to the con­sumer (we’ll see it in mass trans­porta­tion first), and high­ways are still being designed and built pret­ty much the same today as they were in 1964. And where are all the hov­er­craft buzzing around “a foot or two off the ground?”

    “Wall screens” have cer­tain­ly sup­ple­ment­ed, but in no way have “replaced the ordi­nary set”, and as for those 3‑D “trans­par­ent cubes”, well, it sounds as though Mr. Asi­mov has been nip­ping at the LSD-25, which I remind you was still legal in 1964.

    And while Mar­mite and Vegimite may be all the rage in Britain and Aus­tralia, respec­tive­ly, there aren’t too many Amer­i­cans (or any­one else, for that mat­ter) beat­ing down the gro­cers’ doors for fla­vored yeast.

    I’m not sure what Asi­mov con­sid­ers to be “rou­tine jobs”, but it seems to me that cen­tral to the cur­rent debate we’re hav­ing about ille­gal immi­grants is that they are tak­ing up all of the “rou­tine jobs” that Amer­i­cans don’t want, any­way. And if you think that we are (or are becom­ing) a race of “machine ten­ders”, and that our schools should be “ori­ent­ed in this direc­tion”, then you’re just not pay­ing atten­tion to what is going on in the streets. Most peo­ple work real jobs doing real things, and a lot of them don’t even encounter a machine that requires sim­ply “tend­ing”.

    And Dr. Phil notwith­stand­ing, I don’t think any rea­son­able per­son can say that psy­chi­a­try is “the most impor­tant med­ical spe­cial­ty” today. Again, any­one who thinks that bore­dom is wide­spread among the Amer­i­can pop­u­lace today just isn’t pay­ing atten­tion to any­one out­side their imme­di­ate cir­cle.

    And if we have become “a soci­ety of enforced leisure”, it’s only because of the gross dis­par­i­ty between rich and poor and the dis­ap­pear­ance of mean­ing­ful mid­dle-class jobs, which has much more to do with the seques­ter­ing (to use a pop­u­lar 2013 term) of wealth to the few than it has to do with com­put­er automa­tion dis­plac­ing work­ers.

    About the only thing Asi­mov gets right in this entire litany of fan­ta­sy are the pop­u­la­tion num­bers, which are pret­ty much in the ball­park. But then accu­rate pre­dic­tive mod­el­ing for pop­u­la­tion growth has been avail­able for well over a cen­tu­ry now, and was cer­tain­ly avail­able to Asi­mov.

    “Got it right?”

    Let me tell you, any­one that can read Asi­mov’s pre­dic­tions and con­clude that he “got it right” sounds to me as though he attend­ed a school geared toward machine tend­ing, in which read­ing com­pre­hen­sion is not on the cur­ricu­lum.

    • rejane florinda says:

      I think the dif­fer­ence between pre­dic­tion and time trav­el escapes some peo­ple in this dis­cus­sion. For some­one that did not have a time cap­sule to trav­el in, he was pret­ty good in his pre­dic­tions.

      • Ian Wardell says:

        He got very lit­tle right so I’m baf­fled how you reach that con­clu­sion?

        • rejane florinda says:

          well, I think I can relate to his pre­dic­tions in a dif­fer­ent way. I don’t expect him to get every­thing right, just eval­u­ate sim­i­lar­i­ties between what he thought would hap­pen and what is cur­rent­ly in exis­tence in our time. If he had a time trav­el cap­sule, he would’ve been more spe­cif­ic. Come on, vehi­cles with robot­ic brains… that is pret­ty close to some cars we have nowa­days. But he did not pre­dict the inter­net, for exam­ple, just some­thing that could resem­ble smart­phones… and so on and so forth. So, it is kind of an ana­lyt­i­cal method, not a fac­tu­al com­par­i­son. He had some hints but not the whole thing. I am sure you know Michio Kaku’s “Phisics of the Future”. Sci­en­tists don’t exact­ly make pre­dic­tions, they esti­mate the prob­a­bil­i­ties of the future based on what is already hap­pen­ing in their own time. That is not an easy thing to do…n

          • rejane florinda says:

            here is some infor­ma­tion about the book, if it inter­ests you. http://physics.about.com/od/michiokaku/fr/PhysicsFuture.htm

          • Ian Wardell says:

            No I haven’t heard of Michio Kaku’s Physics of the future. I have read a book by him though called visions I think. That was many years ago though! nnTo repeat what I’ve said on facebook:nnThe pre­dic­tions are for what the world will be like in 2014. The tech­nol­o­gy peo­ple will be using. nn“Gadgetry will con­tin­ue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs“nnInn and of itself that does­n’t stand as a pre­dic­tion because it’s so much nof a giv­en. He needs to pro­vide exam­ples. And he does. He men­tions nau­to­mat­ic meals and the like. But the way I cook meals is exact­ly the nsame as back in the 70’s. The only dif­fer­ence now is the wide­spread usen of microwave ovens. Per­son­al­ly I nev­er use microwave ovens to cook nfood as it sim­ply does­n’t taste as nice. I only use them to unfreeze nfood or warm food up. nnu201cCommunications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the per­son you telephone“nnAlthoughn our tech­nol­o­gy is capa­ble of this, I per­son­al­ly have nev­er made a videon tele­phone call where I have seen as well as heard the per­son I’m nspeak­ing to. nn“Byn 2014, elec­tro­lu­mi­nes­cent pan­els will be in com­mon use. Ceil­ings and nwalls will glow soft­ly, and in a vari­ety of col­ors that will change at nthe touch of a push button.u201dnnEr . .no. Com­plete­ly wrong.nnu201cRobots will nei­ther be com­mon nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.u201dnnWell we can always almost guar­an­tee that we’ll be right by mak­ing our pre­dic­tions suf­fi­cient­ly vague!nnu201cThen appli­ances of 2014 will have no elec­tric cords, of course, for they nwill be pow­ered by long- lived bat­ter­ies run­ning on radioisotopes.u201dnnTotally wrong. Long lived bat­ter­ies? That’s a laugh!nnu201c[H]ighwaysn u2026 in the more advanced sec­tions of the world will have passed their npeak in 2014; there will be increas­ing empha­sis on trans­porta­tion that nmakes the least pos­si­ble con­tact with the sur­face. There will be nair­craft, of course, but even ground trav­el will increas­ing­ly take to nthe air a foot or two off the ground.u201dnnAll utter­ly total­ly wrong.nnu201c[V]ehiclesn with u2018Ro­bot-brain­su2019 u2026 can be set for par­tic­u­lar des­ti­na­tions u2026 that nwill then pro­ceed there with­out inter­fer­ence by the slow reflex­es of a nhu­man driver.u201dnnAgainn com­plete­ly wrong. I have *nev­er* seen a dri­ver­less car. Can’t imag­i­nen these google cars will be in wide­spread usage any time soon. Cer­tain­lyn not by next year. Maybe 30 years.nnu201c[W]alln screens will have replaced the ordi­nary set; but trans­par­ent cubes willn be mak­ing their appear­ance in which three-dimen­sion­al view­ing will be npossible.u201dnnTVn sets are get­ting big­ger and big­ger, and slim­mer and slim­mer, but that nwas always a giv­en. No wall screens. No cubes although a few peo­ple ncan watch 3D TV using spe­cial glass­es. But it’s not in wide­spread usagen and I per­son­al­ly have nev­er seen 3D TV. Nor can I imag­ine 3D TV (at nleast where one has to wear glass­es) ever real­ly tak­ing off. So anoth­ern fail.nnu201c[T]he world pop­u­la­tion will be 6,500,000,000“nnFairly accu­rate, but it’s anoth­er pre­dic­tion which was very obvious.nnu201cOrdinaryn agri­cul­ture will keep up with great dif­fi­cul­ty and there will be nu2018farmsu2019 turn­ing to the more effi­cient micro-organ­isms. Processed yeast nand algae prod­ucts will be avail­able in a vari­ety of flavors”.nnAnother fail.nn“Then world of A.D. 2014 will have few rou­tine jobs that can­not be done nbet­ter by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will there­fore nhave become large­ly a race of machine tenders”.nnHow is a rou­tine job defined? Many rou­tine jobs are done bet­ter by machines, but most are not. So a fail. nn“Alln the high-school stu­dents will be taught the fun­da­men­tals of com­put­er ntech­nol­o­gy will become pro­fi­cient in bina­ry arith­metic and will be ntrained to per­fec­tion in the use of the com­put­er lan­guages that will nhave devel­oped out of those like the con­tem­po­rary u201cFortran.u201d“nnWelln I guess school chil­dren are taught how to use com­put­ers. I’m pret­ty nsure that com­put­er pro­gram­ming won’t be com­pul­so­ry though, and doubt nthat they are pro­fi­cient at bina­ry arithmetic!nn”[M]ankindn will suf­fer bad­ly from the dis­ease of bore­dom, a dis­ease spread­ing moren wide­ly each year and grow­ing in inten­si­ty. This will have seri­ous nmen­tal, emo­tion­al and soci­o­log­i­cal con­se­quences, and I dare say that npsy­chi­a­try will be far and away the most impor­tant med­ical spe­cial­ty in n2014.u201dnnAll false. A lot of us could nev­er get bored with the advent of the Internet!nnu201d[T]he most glo­ri­ous sin­gle word in the vocab­u­lary will have become work!u201d in our u201da soci­ety of enforced leisure.u201dnnEh?? he’s hav­ing a lar­rrf! Work is a 4 let­ter word!

          • rejane florinda says:

            There you go, we have dif­fer­ent visions of our cur­rent sit­u­a­tion and of what a pre­dic­tion is. Tell you what: try to make pre­dic­tions from now to 2024, and then, if we live to see if you were right, we can come back to this dis­cus­sion. Right now it just does­n’t make sense to me, so I’ll go back to my asi­mov book (this whole thing made me want to read it again..)n.

          • Ian Wardell says:

            When pre­dict­ing the future it has to be tech­nol­o­gy which is in com­mon usage.nn2024? Well I’ll pre­dict every­thing will be more or less the same.nnOK google glass­es will have lim­it­ed suc­cess when they are first launched. But lat­er mod­els will become more and more pop­u­lar as all the issues are ironed out. It’ll be like the his­to­ry of mobile phones (cell phones). At first very few peo­ple will have them, but even­tu­al­ly they became all pervasive.nnPeople will not make a one way trip to Mars in April 2023 to live the rest of their lives there! I just can’t see that hap­pen­ing, at least not by that time.nnSmart watch­es will find a mar­ket, but they will nev­er become that pop­u­lar. They’re too small and peo­ple will pre­fer their smartphones.nnMuch less stress will be placed on the notion that sat­u­rat­ed fats are a great evil. It will be increas­ing­ly recog­nised by 2024 that it is sug­ar and refined carbs, rather than dietary fat and lack of exer­cise, which is large­ly respon­si­ble for ris­ing obe­si­ty rates and ill-health.nnThere will be more doubt be expressed regard­ing cat­a­stroph­ic anthro­pogenic glob­al warm­ing. The Earth may have heat­ed up, and this might part­ly be due to the activ­i­ties of man, but it won’t be as bad as many sci­en­tists are cur­rent­ly pre­dict­ing.

          • Ian Wardell says:

            As a mat­ter of inter­est I made some pre­dic­tion on face­book back in May 2011:nn1. Cap­i­tal­ist economies will con­tin­ue to be char­ac­terised byn­bust and boom, at least until the end of this century.nn2. Glob­al warm­ing might occur, but it will not be par­tic­u­lar­ly significant.nn3. We won’t land on the moon again for the next 20 years.nn4. Nobody will land on Mars until at least 2080nn5. 3D TV using those glass­es will not take off.nn6. We will nev­er be able to cre­ate con­scious robots.nn7. Androids who can maybe be con­fused for real human beings (even though not conscious)nwill not be devel­oped before the year 2800.

          • rejane florinda says:

            as I said, it is a mat­ter of per­spec­tive. None of the pre­dic­tions you are mak­ing are spe­cif­ic enough to be proven right or wrong. You are just guess­ing, and with­out any sci­en­tif­ic data or research to sup­port your pre­dic­tions, they lack the same accu­ra­cy you are say­ing asi­mov does not present in his own guess­ing.

          • Ian Wardell says:

            If I was mere­ly guess­ing I would­n’t have both­ered to type it. I’m giv­ing pre­dic­tions to the best of my abil­i­ty. nnAs I said on face­book where I past­ed the same predictions:nn“I nthink mak­ing pre­dic­tions is extra­or­di­nar­i­ly dif­fi­cult. And I don’t haven the knowl­edge to attempt such a thing. How­ev­er I decid­ed not to be nbor­ing and gave it a crack any­way”.

          • rejane florinda says:

            You can’t take a hint, can you? Maybe I should be more clear: I don’t think it mat­ters. If you think you are bet­ter than Isaac Asi­mov good for you. I just don’t think the same as you and don’t want to dis­cuss it fur­ther.

          • Ian Wardell says:

            WOW! You’re stark star­ing bonkers!nnIf a “hint” to ter­mi­nate the con­ver­sa­tion equates to request­ing me to make pre­dic­tions and re-com­menc­ing our con­ver­sa­tion 11 years hence to see if my pre­dic­tions have come true, then indeed I’m unable to take your “hints”.nnI have nev­er said nor insin­u­at­ed I am any bet­ter than Asi­mov in mak­ing pre­dic­tions — try read­ing what I say. I think every­one is pret­ty hope­less at pre­dict­ing. Asi­mov does slight­ly bet­ter than most, but that isn’t say­ing a great deal.nnNo I have insuf­fi­cient inter­est in read­ing that book. For one thing peo­ple are hope­less at pre­dict­ing, and besides there’s too many oth­er more impor­tant non-fic­tion books to read.nnNow go away and stop pes­ter­ing me with your asi­nine remarks . .

          • rejane florinda says:

            Very good way to save face: offend­ing the oppo­site side of the con­ver­sa­tion. I went away but I did­n’t want to hurt your feel­ings, oh mighty Ian. Should­n’t have both­ered that much, seen that you don’t have any trou­ble in attack­ing me for lack of inter­est. I stopped being inter­est­ed when I saw you were talk­ing to your­self, not with me. Have a nice future.

          • rejane florinda says:

            Man, this was fun! we should do it again some time…

          • rejane florinda says:

            ok, Ian.nSee you in ten years…

          • Ian Wardell says:

            Not sure if you’re being seri­ous or not. But I think I might as well type up my pre­dic­tions on my blog over the next few days on there. Pay a vis­it on 11th Sep 2024 and make a com­ment, regard­less of whether I’m still alive or not. Don’t think many peo­ple will be inter­est­ed, the pre­dic­tions are very mun­dane and cautious!nnhttp://ianwardell.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/are-perceptual-illusions-always.html

  • Duncan says:

    I’d say he got about half of it right, and half of it way wrong. I know I don’t have a cord­less stove that has my break­fast and lunch pre­pared from my orders the day before. And I don’t go shop­ping for TV din­ers dri­ving a car that hov­ers two feet above the sel­dom used road­way. Just say­ing.

  • Badger says:

    A pity he did­n’t con­cen­trate more on geopol­i­tics; but that is the most dif­fi­cult of all.

    Who could have then pre­dict­ed the col­lapse of com­mu­nism, the rise of the lib­er­al left, the threat of mil­i­tant Islamism and the resur­gence of anti­semitism?

  • Jane says:

    who is Dave Juli­ette and did he write this bril­liant rejoin­der quick­ly?

  • “…a race of machine ten­ders.” Yeah, the one we all rage against. Quite pre­scient.

  • roderickbeck says:

    He got it most­ly wrong.

  • beatlchic says:

    If more of you com­ment­ing here had been a child of the 60’s (like me) …you would’ve tru­ly got the SENSE of just how close to the mark Asi­mov real­ly was!

    • Unlicensed Dremel says:

      It does­n’t mat­ter when you’re born — the only thing you need to eval­u­ate his pre­dic­tions are the sub­stance of the pre­dic­tions, and the real­i­ty next year. He was dead right on quite a few, but dead wrong on sev­er­al as well… Over­all, mild­ly impres­sive.

    • rejane florinda says:

      hel­looo, I am not from the 60’s but I get how close he was in almost every­thing. You don’t need to be old or new in this mat­ter. Just hav­ing a nor­mal under­stand­ing of his­to­ry will do.

  • Charles Burns says:

    Those who say he got it wrong sim­ple don’t read enough:

    Cor­rect: Gad­getry will relieve us of tedious jobs (obvi­ous).

    Par­tial: Automeals: This isn’t here yet, but there are machines that make ham­burg­ers and sand­wich­es from start to fin­ish.

    Cor­rect: Com­mu­ni­ca­tions sight/sound: He pre­dict­ed smart­phones, satel­lite phones, and Irid­i­um.

    Cor­rect: Elec­tro­lu­mi­nes­cent panels/colors/touch: He pre­dict­ed mul­ti-col­or LED lights. I have them in my pool, hot tub, and can eas­i­ly get them for the home.

    Par­tial: “Robots will nei­ther be com­mon nor very good in 2014”: Room­ba, Aquabot. Both are “OK” and uncom­mon. Not spe­cif­ic enough to say he “nailed it”.

    Incor­rect: “The appli­ances of 2014 will have no elec­tric cords”: We may have the tech­nol­o­gy if not for safe­ty prob­lems of nuke pow­er, but this pre­dic­tion is still wrong.

    Cor­rect: “there will be increas­ing empha­sis on trans­porta­tion that makes the least pos­si­ble con­tact with the sur­face.” http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/08/30/super-bullet-train-test_n_3843685.html

    Cor­rect: “[V]ehicles with ‘Robot-brains’”. Neva­da issues dri­vers licens­es for self-dri­ving cars. Google uses them to pick up guests. The tech­nol­o­gy is here now, but not yet wide­ly adopt­ed.

    Cor­rect: “[W]all screens will have replaced the ordi­nary set”

    Cor­rect: “but trans­par­ent cubes will be mak­ing their appear­ance in which three-dimen­sion­al view­ing will be pos­si­ble.” http://gajitz.com/worlds-first-true-3d-display-projects-pictures-in-mid-air/

    http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/mit-researchers-develop-hologram-3d-display-that-doesn-t-require-special-glasses

    Cor­rect: “[T]he world pop­u­la­tion will be 6,500,000,000 and the pop­u­la­tion of the Unit­ed States will be 350,000,000”

    (It’s a lit­tle high­er, but very close)

    Incor­rect: “Ordi­nary agri­cul­ture will keep up with great dif­fi­cul­ty” Thanks to Nor­man Bor­laug, prob­a­bly the great­est hero in world his­to­ry, this is wrong. It could have gone either wait.

    More incor­rect than cor­rect: “The world of A.D. 2014 will have few rou­tine jobs that can­not be done bet­ter by some machine than by any human being.”

    We have machines that replace human work­ers at most menial tasks — Mak­ing burg­ers, man­u­fac­tur­ing cars, man­u­fac­tur­ing iPads (those fac­to­ries are being auto­mat­ed as I type this), but we have not become a soci­ety of machine ten­ders. Much more so than before, but not there yet.

    Unknown: “[M]ankind will suf­fer bad­ly from the dis­ease of bore­dom” I’m not sure how this can be ver­i­fied or dis­proven. I’m not bored.

    Unknown: “[T]he most glo­ri­ous sin­gle word in the vocab­u­lary will have become work!”. I’m not sure how to mea­sure the glo­ry of a word.

    I’d say he got most of them right…Though this arti­cle lacks an exhaus­tive list of pre­dic­tions.

    • Ray O'Rourke says:

      I far as the dis­ease of bore­dom is con­cerned I believe that pre­dic­tion is pret­ty spot-on: con­sid­er how many peo­ple have been diag­nosed with ADHD, which could very well be described that way. We cer­tain­ly have enough chil­dren on heavy med­ica­tion for that — do they ever get off of it?

      • rejane florinda says:

        and of course, the oth­er side of bore­dom: depres­sion. which is becom­ing the most com­mom and dan­ger­ous ill­ness of this cen­tu­ry.

      • Cameron says:

        There would have been equal pro­por­tions of chil­dren with ADHD back then, the only thing that has changed is we have become bet­ter at diag­nos­ing it, and Big Phar­ma realised more diag­noses= more drugs sold.

        • Ray O'Rourke says:

          Or per­haps bet­ter at treat­ing the symp­toms. We did­n’t throw kids on a med­ica­tion they’d have to take their entire lives, rather it was han­dled prop­er­ly through behav­ior mod­i­fi­ca­tion — learn how to behave prop­er­ly rather than being giv­en free reign to act up how­ev­er you’d like (which seems to be today’s method of rais­ing chil­dren). Instead, we were dis­ci­plined & taught you don’t act up like that. They’d rather pay heav­i­ly over­priced charges for a med­ica­tion with­out any actu­al cur­ing of the prob­lem.

    • revjoeyreed says:

      Many hand-held appli­ances are bat­tery-oper­at­ed and recharge­able. Depends on how one defines “appli­ance.”

    • rejane florinda says:

      I think that dis­ease is depres­sion. It is some kind of bore­dom that takes over the depressed mind. You know, noth­ing is good, noth­ing is inter­est­ing, you think about dying all the time = bore­dom. Right on.

      • grayjohn says:

        Don’t con­fuse bore­dom with despair. Bore­dom is not a fac­tor of depres­sion.

        • rejane florinda says:

          of course it is, dear. Despair is not the only fac­tor on a depressed mind. There is also fear, bore­dom, lon­li­ness, anger, anx­i­ety, and oh, what is the name of that thing again? yes, bore­dom… despair is actu­al­ly a very severe stage of depres­sion, not it’s only aspect. Trust me, it is there all the time. But what do I know, I’ve only suf­fered from depres­sion these last ten years of my life…n

    • cecilia says:

      they are not com­mon but some cell phones recharge wire­less­ly right now. I believe the Sam­sung S4 is one. So Asi­mov may only be off by 5 years on that “pre­dic­tion” depend­ing on whether or not that tech­nol­o­gy catch­es on

  • disqus_KxAHnCo4Tu says:

    well he got some of the things right. I was at the 1964 Worlds Fair as a High School Stu­dent and was excit­ed about the future. I worked in the space pro­gram 1967–1973 and after we land­ed on the Moon thought the SCi Fi future I grew up read­ing about was here !! Unfor­tu­nate­ly Nixon and lat­er Pres­i­dents did not have the charis­ma and lead­er­ship Kennedy had and we got mired in pol­i­tics, cor­rup­tion and they being paid off by the mil­i­tary indus­tri­al com­plex. The future is more than like­ly to be “Roller­ball” where the cor­po­ra­tions run the world…all gov­’ts hav­ing failed. The USA was the last great world leader…there will be no oth­er, unless its Mon­san­to, GE, or some oth­er cor­po­rate giant who runs the politics.….the only hope for us peas­ants is to emi­grate to Mars…and start over…give the Earth to the Bilder­berg­ers, Masons or who­ev­er are run­ning things. For the future… look at Mars One, and The Mars Soci­ety ( read ” the case for mars” by Dr Zubin and “High Fron­tier” by Dr Oneil)

  • rejane florinda says:

    He is one of my heroes.

  • grayjohn says:

    This was all BO (Before Oba­ma) and the death of hope. Had the world pro­ceed­ed the way it was back then, well, things would be amaz­ing­ly bet­ter than they are now. But they did­n’t fac­tor in the evils of pro­gres­sivism and utopi­anism and the absolute polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion we have today. Azi­movs idea of “Risks” should be adopt­ed now as the way to treat crim­i­nals.

  • rg57 says:

    You regard these pre­dic­tions as “right”?nnnMost of these are seri­ous­ly off the mark.

  • Jake VanWagoner says:

    ” Schools will have to be ori­ent­ed in this directionu2026. 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 u201cFortran.u201d“nnnShould have been true. It would have been if not for the entrenched crapfest we call an edu­ca­tion sys­tem.

  • Jake VanWagoner says:

    u201cOrdinary agri­cul­ture will keep up with great dif­fi­cul­ty and there will be u2018farmsu2019 turn­ing to the more effi­cient micro-organ­isms. Processed yeast and algae prod­ucts will be avail­able in a vari­ety of flavors.u201d“nnnRight con­cept, but his tim­ing is off.nThe octo­ber 2013 Wired mag­a­zine has an arti­cle on “the won­ders of processed food,” which has a blurb on syn­thet­ic food.

  • He did­n’t fore­see prog ass­wipes like you either. nghe thu­at duong pho|giay patin|giay patin x2

  • Open Culture says:

    Hi there,nnnI’m just curi­ous what Face­book page just men­tioned our post. Any­one know? Thanks in advance.nnnCheers,nDan (edi­tor)

  • Jack says:

    At least he did­n’t start some hokey reli­gion for whacked-out ego-celebs.

  • zohaib says:

    we can not say all of his pre­dic­tions are right but 50% are right .….this also a big achiev­ment for him

  • LD Bottorff says:

    Sor­ry to dis­ap­point you, but Asi­mov did NOT pre­dict the Irid­i­um com­mu­ni­ca­tions sys­tem. He specif­i­cal­ly ref­er­enced syn­chro­nous satel­lites hov­er­ing in space. He was essen­tial­ly wrong on most of these pre­dic­tions. But if any­one has the num­ber I can use to direct dial some­one at a weath­er sta­tion at the south pole, let me know.

  • greg says:

    Accu­rate.. Yes?? — about as accu­rate as :-The cli­mate change fore­cast­ers of doom, who believe that human inter­ven­tion holds the sole solu­tion.
    Its been going on since Moses at least!
    The ” irrefutable sci­ence” of glob­al warm­ing,
    But accu­rate is a mat­ter of degrees, there are no whole num­bers in accu­rate, only per­cent­ages at best.

  • Ronin says:

    So glad that buttmunch Ian final­ly decid­ed to STFU.

    You only have the courage to cri­tique a dead man, Ian. Were Isaac alive, you would be some­where else, prob­a­bly crit­i­ciz­ing Philip K. Dick or Ray­mond Chan­dler.

    Typ­i­cal behav­ior from some­one who would­n’t have qual­i­fied to grow between their toes.

  • Khaos says:

    “He actu­al­ly couldn’t pos­si­bly have been more dead wrong about bore­dom”
    You could­nt be more wrong about this state­ment actu­al­ly. There is real­ly much to do, but the gen­er­al young pop­u­la­tion is so bored with them­selves it is unre­al. It is hard to believe they have no access to infor­ma­tion of how many things they could do with their time to give them­selves so dif­fer­ent futures, yet they are nowhere close to uti­lize their time at all…

  • rick says:

    Too bad he did­n’t pre­dict the insane com­ment com­mu­ni­ty respons­es. We might have had time to guard against it.

  • Blake says:

    Is this true

  • Tyler Walker says:

    “Robots will nei­ther be com­mon nor very good in 2014, but they will be in exis­tence.”

    Isaac has a very good under­stand­ing of how hard it is to first of all, make a good and work­ing robot and 2. how in the future there wont be a lot of robots. even in the year 2020, i don’t see any robots any­where, frankly!

  • Ty says:

    I sort of agree and dis­agree. bore­dom can influ­ence a per­son tremen­dous­ly, even for me. but, to take a side with you, he sort of had that wrong, because not every­one is bored all the time. if some­one was bored, they would even­tu­al­ly find some­thing to do, or have some­thing to keep them enter­tained. but, all and all, i agree with you the most, and Isaac the least.

  • wow your a scammer dud says:

    bru you bad at adveri­tis­ing what the **** is that

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