Here’s a little bit of trivia for you ever-curious readers. Do you guys remember a noted author by the name of Isaac Asimov? No? Well, way back in 1964 he … wait. Do you guys remember 1964? OK, don’t worry about it. Just know that it was a long, long time ago just after the caveman days and just before man first walked on the moon.
Way back in those days of newspaper-reading and black-and-white TV, this popular science fiction writer named Asimov wrote an article for The New York Times that predicted what one might see if they visited the World’s Fair in the year 2014.
He was off a little on a few points. We don’t have any moon colonies, for instance. And cars that fly—hovering above the road on “jets of compressed air,” in Asimov’s vision—still haven’t hit the road. Even the World’s Fair itself has sort of gone the way of the 45 single: They’ve morphed into something more nationally focused, been renamed Expos and there won’t be another one until a 2015 event in Milan, Italy. But a lot of his other predictions were spot on. Seriously, he was predicting the likes of wireless cell phones, giant 3-D TVs and cars with “robot brains.” He also wrote:
One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better.
Now there’s one line that I thought perspicacious. What indeed have we become but a large group of people who like to isolate ourselves away with videogames, streaming movies on a wall-mounted flat-screen and Internet connected “friends?” There was a study recently that pointed to the fact that we as a nation are driving much less than we used to. And some experts suggested that it’s because, well, we don’t need to jump in the car to go visit friends or relatives any more. We can simply just check them out from the comfort of your own living room with a little Skype session on the iPad.
Anyway, the news/entertainment site BuzzFeed took a look at the predictions Mr. Asimov laid out all those years ago and how they came to fruition in this article. It’s an interesting set of illustrations. And it leaves you thinking, “Wow! We are the future!”
Or at least it leaves you wondering what the newest thing will be 50 more years down the technical, social and entertainment highway. Looks like we won’t be needing Asimov’s flying cars, but hey, the robot servants might still be nice.
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