Hey, did you know that, fifty years ago, Isaac Asimov made a bunch of predictions about 2014?
I sure didn’t.
The link is here.
I don’t know that I would agree that the predictions are “eerily accurate,” as the title of the article asserts. But some were certainly dead on. I think it was pretty easy to predict that there would be a lot of labor-saving gadgets around by now, but I wonder how easy it really was, fifty years ago, to declare that “electroluminescent panels” would be widely used and important?
Maybe that was a bit easier to predict for a chemist?
The author of the article pegs this one as wrong:
We will live in a “society of enforced leisure,” and “the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!”
But I’m not so sure Asimov was actually wrong about that. What is involuntary unemployment, after all, but “enforced leisure”? What about all the people who have just graduated and can’t find jobs, or who have lost their jobs and are now unable to find a new one? Wouldn’t you agree that they would generally consider “work” to be a glorious word?
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After tracking down the original article
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.html
…it seems that the “eerily accurate” wording is over the top: they concentrate on the hits and largely exclude the misses.
SF writers just aren’t that good at predicting the future, which might be embarrassing if anybody else was any better.
Oh, thanks, I should have gone looking for the original.