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I saw Asimov’s predictions for the World Fair 2014 over at Andrew Ducker’s Interesting Links and my comment grew into an essay as I tried to assess the Master of Robotics efforts at predicting his future, my present and my son’s past.


http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/2964150.html#comments

First off, I’m docking him half marks for incorrectly predicting the date of the World’s Fair. We’ve one in 2013 and 2015 but none in 2014.

But how did he do on the substance.




Right about electro-luminescent panels technology, wrong about wide spread adoption. In a surprise turn of events a species evolved on African savanah prefers natural day light and gets sick when kept in the dark.

Wrong about under ground houses and mock windows. Except in the Tolkein films. Which don’t get nearly as much of a mention as they probably warrant from such an influential futurologist.

Wrong about the way “automeals” are produced. I don’t have a general purpose meal preparer or even lots of gadgets that prepare meals for me, but I do have access to factories making frozen meals I can microwave in minutes. When guests arrive I keep the number of a local pizzaria handy if they are too important for the Pobblie Ping.  Alas, the meals are not delivered by pneumatic tube because in no possible future world does it make economic sense to build a massive city wide capital intensive transport scheme just a decade before robot cars make fixed line scheme reduntant and there are millions of unemployed bored teenagers regretting that they took Ballet Studies at college. No one would do such a thing.

Broadly right about robots. I saw them play football against the Scottish Premiership All-Stars last summer. The robots would have won by more if the ref had had Azimov’s understanding of the off-side rule and SNY-11 wasn’t a total donkey. Honestly, how could it miss from there?

Wrong about the power cords, wrong about the batteries, wrong about fission. Bizarrely I am more at risk of death from tripping over one of the 97 separate power cords connecting some form of device to the coal powered grid than I am of dying of radiation sickness. (So long as I stay off the sushi and don’t go swimming.)

Not quite right about experimental fussion plants. There are plans to build one but I don’t think any are accually in operation. Right about solar panels although a bit off about their use in northern latitudes e.g. Germany. Sadly missed the raft of clean air acts that pretty much eliminated smog in the West – probably blinded by the smog in the 60’s.

Sort of nearly kinda right on travel being in the air and highways being passed their peak. Not so much cars floating on air but eccentric billionaires floating on air and too much coffee and Japanese trains using maglev with an increased look at railways and shipping.  And what is it with the sixties and flying cars. Enough with the flying cars. Flying trains is where it’s at, and Zeppelins.  Zeppelins are cool.

Pretty much spot on about robot cars. I wonder if he had shares in Google. But then, you’d expect the man who invented robotics to be right about robots.

More wrong than he could imagine about the moving sidewalks. Attempts to install such a thing in Edinburgh would cause a riot as NHS and local government accountants burnt the state to prevent the waste of life and treasure. We don’t need a system of seats that move along fixed lines in this city, not when robot cars are just a decade away. Just a decade away I tell you.

Spot on about communications being sight and sound and mobile and involving documents.  Here is the video feed from the antartic weather station.

http://www.usap.gov/videoclipsandmaps/mcmwebcam.cfm

and here is how to direct dial McMurdo

http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/antarctica/background/NSF/mc-stay.html#16

Unfortunately wrong about being able to phone someone on one of the moon colonies. The phone system could manage it but there is no one home on the moon.

Really, that’s both making me sad and delighted at the same time. My face looks like it’s been painted by Dali. We can phone the antartic on our mobiles from almost anywhere in the world and we could call the moon if there was anyone there.

Sort of right about using lasers in plastic pipes to communicate and engineers still wrestling with the problem – mainly the problem of how to persuade the good citizens of Edinburgh to let them dig up their streets (again) to lay the fibre optic cables.

Very close on 3-D TV’s, we’re certainly able to buy one right now. I don’t think anyone is watching ballet on them but that Robots vs All-Stars game was cracking in 3-D and so was Milley Cyrus (who ever she is, I genuinely have no idea.)

Under-estimated world population. Over estimated US population but that might be because most of them are now living in a hotel deep under the Canadian ice-cap with staggering luxury and socialised health care. Actually, maybe that’s what happened to the Democrat majority in the House. There is no massive Republican conspiracy to gerrymander Congress it’s just that 35 million Democrats have tunnelled under the Great Lakes and set up home under the Hudson Bay.

Not bad on micro-food. If you can stomach it there is such a thing as Quorn (not a mushroom TM) and vat grown hamburgers which will taste as good as Big Mac are ready to be grilled on our fussion powered gridle any decade now.

Correct about the whole world population not yet enjoying the gadgetry of today but the growth of mobile phone usage in the Third World is surely the main reason why McMurdo base has an unlisted number. Damn African kids – got nothing better to do than call the South Pole and ask if they have any polar bears to the north of them. Overly pessimistic about the direction of travel for proportion of the world in deprevation, broadly right about inequality but he seems to have missed the Coming Class War.

Wrong about how the birth rate was lowered.  No big world agreement.People just realised that dying in child birth or spending twenty years changing foul flavoured nappies didn’t compare well to watching the Rosyth Robots win their tenth consecutive Scottish Premiership title in 2014 on the big 3-D TV whilst chowing down on a Quorn burger. Sex without babies, still the second most popular leisure activity in 2014. 

Pretty spot on about a live expectancy of 85 in some parts of the world.  Mainly the parts of the world that didn’t install moving sidewalks with benches.

Right about the increase of automation but wrong about the increase in machine tending jobs – crucially missed the automation of the machine tending jobs too.  Painfully wrong about everyone learing how to program computers. Surely he should have foreseen that with huge 3-D TV’s all the cool kids would be yearning to become ballarinas.

As for boredom, how could you possibly be bored in a world where you could instantly connect to all your friends on your phone, watch 3-D robot ballet on a portable 3-D TV, prank call penguins and go and stare in wonder at the pneumatic pipe city interface?

Overall, not a bad series of individual guesses but crucially a bit of failure to see how various predictions intereacted with each other and a quaintly rational expection of human behaviour.

Date: 2013-08-29 03:21 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] f4f3.livejournal.com
You really don't like the trams, do you?

On robotic cars... If I'd ticked all the option boxes on my new car (instead of just the fun ones) my cruise control wouldn't just automatically brake when the traffic slowed down it would automatically stop and go and maintain a safe distance in any kind of traffic. I'll have parking assistance which will beep at me, but I could also have had cameras to judge if a space was big enough, and which would get me into the parking space too. The sat nav will calculate the fastest route taking into account traffic conditions. Apparently (and this may apply only in America) the car would phone a call centre in Houston if I had a crash and tell them where I was, how fast I'd been going when I crashed, and how badly damaged the car was. Applying a proprietary logarithm to this it would decide how likely it was that I'd been injured, and how critically. I must admit, the idea of a car that transmits my location to a mega-corp feels a little 2000 AD to me, not to say very 1984.

Robotic cars - coming at us bit by bit.

Date: 2013-08-29 03:32 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] danieldwilliam.livejournal.com
Well, robotic cars coming at us at a safe approach speed and breaking in good time to avoid injuring us.

I’m not that against the trams beyond the obvious cost and project delay. I’m looking forward to them.

But I do think that if I were in charge of the city transport I would wait ten years before building a £1bn pound tram line to see what robot buses were like.

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