On the occasion of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, celebrated in the middle of the nuclear race and with tomorrow hanging by a thread, the writer Isaac Asimov ventured to predict what life would be like in that uncertain and distant future that he placed in 2014 , that is, in our immediate present. In an essay published in The New York Times, the prolific author of The Foundation dared to predict the technological advances that would coexist (or compete) with humans half a century later . Although some of his predictions remain science fiction to this day, most of his inconceivable hypotheses have been fulfilled, a tribute to his imagined science of psychohistory, capable of predicting with mathematical precision the future of events.
This divinatory discipline only exists in his novels, but the truth is that the biochemist had an amazing intuition regarding the achievements of the scientists who would succeed him. Of course, Asimov mentioned in his article a world with a significant presence of robots, although these were not very common, nor very advanced, but rather small automata capable of performing simple tasks, still far from the artificial intelligence desired by Alan Turing. “The kitchen cabinets will prepare meals, heat water and turn it into coffee,” was literally one of his guesses. Continuing with domestic technology, he also predicted the existence of wall-mounted television screens and tinted windows to block out light.
Asimov prophesied the advent of video calling and wireless devices . “Communications will be audiovisual and one will be able to see, in addition to listening to the person they are calling,” the article correctly predicts, which also contemplates the possibility of establishing communications with any point on Earth, including the meteorological stations of Antarctica. , viable today thanks to satellites. In line with telecommunications, he also predicted that in 2014 only unmanned ships would have reached Mars, as is the case with the last vehicle sent to the planet, the Curiosity rover, although the first mission human exploration will not wait.
The visionary even dared to diagnose the behavior of society derived from these radical changes in their habits, concluding that machines would make life easier for us to the point of spreading a true epidemic of boredom , with mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and that Psychiatry would therefore be the most important medical specialty in 2014. Without reaching Asimov’s extremism, it could be considered that there is a certain tendency to dissatisfaction, at least with respect to the use of social networks. He also warned of the social bias attributed to the cost of technological advances, with his statement “not all the population of the world will enjoy the gadgets of the future in full.”
Issac Asimov erred, however, when he speculated on the existence of microorganism farms, experimental nuclear fusion plants, nuclear batteries for mobile phones, underwater dwellings, flying transport and other innovations that, in reality, are already in the testing phase and perhaps they will be marketed before the century of the formulation of these prophecies , which has nothing of “infused science” and much of “science” to dry.
