[bofhers] Espectacular artículo de Isaac Asimov en 1964: Predicciones acerca del 2014
- From: Kyle von Bofhlander <kylebofh@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: bofhers@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 01 Jan 2014 12:40:00 +0100
Una vezmás reafirmo mi admiración por este visionario/consumidor de LSD.
Porque lo que predice sólo es posible con una mente preclara o mediante
un estado alterado de la conciencia.
August 16, 1964
Visit to the World's Fair of 2014
By ISAAC ASIMOV
The New York World's Fair of 1964 is dedicated to "Peace Through
Understanding." Its glimpses of the world of tomorrow rule out
thermonuclear warfare. And why not? If a thermonuclear war takes place,
the future will not be worth discussing. So let the missiles slumber
eternally on their pads and let us observe what may come in the
nonatomized world of the future.
What is to come, through the fair's eyes at least, is wonderful. The
direction in which man is traveling is viewed with buoyant hope, nowhere
more so than at the General Electric pavilion. There the audience whirls
through four scenes, each populated by cheerful, lifelike dummies that
move and talk with a facility that, inside of a minute and a half,
convinces you they are alive.
The scenes, set in or about 1900, 1920, 1940 and 1960, show the advances
of electrical appliances and the changes they are bringing to living. I
enjoyed it hugely and only regretted that they had not carried the
scenes into the future. What will life be like, say, in 2014 A.D., 50
years from now? What will the World's Fair of 2014 be like?
I don't know, but I can guess.
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. 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.
Windows need be no more than an archaic touch, and even when present
will be polarized to block out the harsh sunlight. The degree of opacity
of the glass may even be made to alter automatically in accordance with
the intensity of the light falling upon it.
There is an underground house at the fair which is a sign of the future.
if its windows are not polarized, they can nevertheless alter the
"scenery" by changes in lighting. Suburban houses underground, with
easily controlled temperature, free from the vicissitudes of weather,
with air cleaned and light controlled, should be fairly common. At the
New York World's Fair of 2014, General Motors' "Futurama" may well
display vistas of underground cities complete with light- forced
vegetable gardens. The surface, G.M. will argue, will be given over to
large-scale agriculture, grazing and parklands, with less space wasted
on actual human occupancy.
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. Complete
lunches and dinners, with the food semiprepared, will be stored in the
freezer until ready for processing. I suspect, though, that even in 2014
it will still be advisable to have a small corner in the kitchen unit
where the more individual meals can be prepared by hand, especially when
company is coming.
Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in
existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present fair has no robots but it
is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing
complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If
machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years
hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as
the "brains" of robots. In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World's
Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaid*large,
clumsy, slow- moving but capable of general picking-up, arranging,
cleaning and manipulation of various appliances. It will undoubtedly
amuse the fairgoers to scatter debris over the floor in order to see the
robot lumberingly remove it and classify it into "throw away" and "set
aside." (Robots for gardening work will also have made their appearance.)
General Electric at the 2014 World's Fair will be showing 3-D movies of
its "Robot of the Future," neat and streamlined, its cleaning appliances
built in and performing all tasks briskly. (There will be a three-hour
wait in line to see the film, for some things never change.)
The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they
will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. The
isotopes will not be expensive for they will be by- products of the
fission-power plants which, by 2014, will be supplying well over half
the power needs of humanity. But once the isotype batteries are used up
they will be disposed of only through authorized agents of the
manufacturer.
And experimental fusion-power plant or two will already exist in 2014.
(Even today, a small but genuine fusion explosion is demonstrated at
frequent intervals in the G.E. exhibit at the 1964 fair.) Large
solar-power stations will also be in operation in a number of desert and
semi-desert areas -- Arizona, the Negev, Kazakhstan. In the more
crowded, but cloudy and smoggy areas, solar power will be less
practical. An exhibit at the 2014 fair will show models of power
stations in space, collecting sunlight by means of huge parabolic
focusing devices and radiating the energy thus collected down to earth.
The world of 50 years hence will have shrunk further. At the 1964 fair,
the G.M. exhibit depicts, among other things, "road-building factories"
in the tropics and, closer to home, crowded highways along which long
buses move on special central lanes. There is every likelihood that
highways at least 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. Visitors to
the 1964 fair can travel there in an "aquafoil," which lifts itself on
four stilts and skims over the water with a minimum of friction. This is
surely a stop-gap. By 2014 the four stilts will have been replaced by
four jets of compressed air so that the vehicle will make no contact
with either liquid or solid surfaces.
Jets of compressed air will also lift land vehicles off the highways,
which, among other things, will minimize paving problems. Smooth earth
or level lawns will do as well as pavements. Bridges will also be of
less importance, since cars will be capable of crossing water on their
jets, though local ordinances will discourage the practice.
Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with
"Robot-brains"*vehicles that can be set for particular destinations and
that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes
of a human driver. I suspect one of the major attractions of the 2014
fair will be rides on small roboticized cars which will maneuver in
crowds at the two-foot level, neatly and automatically avoiding each other.
For short-range travel, moving sidewalks (with benches on either side,
standing room in the center) will be making their appearance in downtown
sections. They will be raised above the traffic. Traffic will continue
(on several levels in some places) only because all parking will be
off-street and because at least 80 per cent of truck deliveries will be
to certain fixed centers at the city's rim. Compressed air tubes will
carry goods and materials over local stretches, and the switching
devices that will place specific shipments in specific destinations will
be one of the city's marvels.
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 (shown in chill splendor as
part of the '64 General Motors exhibit).
For that matter, you will be able to reach someone at the moon colonies,
concerning which General Motors puts on a display of impressive vehicles
(in model form) with large soft tires*intended to negotiate the uneven
terrain that may exist on our natural satellite.
Any number of simultaneous conversations between earth and moon can be
handled by modulated laser beams, which are easy to manipulate in space.
On earth, however, laser beams will have to be led through plastic
pipes, to avoid material and atmospheric interference. Engineers will
still be playing with that problem in 2014.
Conversations with the moon will be a trifle uncomfortable, but the way,
in that 2.5 seconds must elapse between statement and answer (it takes
light that long to make the round trip). Similar conversations with Mars
will experience a 3.5-minute delay even when Mars is at its closest.
However, by 2014, only unmanned ships will have landed on Mars, though a
manned expedition will be in the works and in the 2014 Futurama will
show a model of an elaborate Martian colony.
As for television, wall screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but
transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which
three-dimensional viewing will be possible. In fact, one popular exhibit
at the 2014 World's Fair will be such a 3-D TV, built life-size, in
which ballet performances will be seen. The cube will slowly revolve for
viewing from all angles.
One can go on indefinitely in this happy extrapolation, but all is not
rosy.
As I stood in line waiting to get into the General Electric exhibit at
the 1964 fair, I found myself staring at Equitable Life's grim sign
blinking out the population of the United States, with the number (over
191,000,000) increasing by 1 every 11 seconds. During the interval which
I spent inside the G.E. pavilion, the American population had increased
by nearly 300 and the world's population by 6,000.
In 2014, there is every likelihood that the world population will be
6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be
350,000,000. Boston-to-Washington, the most crowded area of its size on
the earth, will have become a single city with a population of over
40,000,000.
Population pressure will force increasing penetration of desert and
polar areas. Most surprising and, in some ways, heartening, 2014 will
see a good beginning made in the colonization of the continental
shelves. Underwater housing will have its attractions to those who like
water sports, and will undoubtedly encourage the more efficient
exploitation of ocean resources, both food and mineral. General Motors
shows, in its 1964 exhibit, the model of an underwater hotel of what
might be called mouth-watering luxury. The 2014 World's Fair will have
exhibits showing cities in the deep sea with bathyscaphe liners carrying
men and supplies across and into the abyss.
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
2014 fair will feature an Algae Bar at which "mock-turkey" and
"pseudosteak" will be served. It won't be bad at all (if you can dig up
those premium prices), but there will be considerable psychological
resistance to such an innovation.
Although technology will still keep up with population through 2014, it
will be only through a supreme effort and with but partial success. Not
all the world's population will enjoy the gadgety world of the future to
the full. A larger portion than today will be deprived and although they
may be better off, materially, than today, they will be further behind
when compared with the advanced portions of the world. They will have
moved backward, relatively.
Nor can technology continue to match population growth if that remains
unchecked. Consider Manhattan of 1964, which has a population density of
80,000 per square mile at night and of over 100,000 per square mile
during the working day. If the whole earth, including the Sahara, the
Himalayan Mountain peaks, Greenland, Antarctica and every square mile of
the ocean bottom, to the deepest abyss, were as packed as Manhattan at
noon, surely you would agree that no way to support such a population
(let alone make it comfortable) was conceivable. In fact, support would
fail long before the World-Manhattan was reached.
Well, the earth's population is now about 3,000,000,000 and is doubling
every 40 years. If this rate of doubling goes unchecked, then a
World-Manhattan is coming in just 500 years. All earth will be a single
choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse /long before that!/
There are only two general ways of preventing this: (1) raise the death
rate; (2) lower the birth rate. Undoubtedly, the world of A>D. 2014 will
have agreed on the latter method. Indeed, the increasing use of
mechanical devices to replace failing hearts and kidneys, and repair
stiffening arteries and breaking nerves will have cut the death rate
still further and have lifted the life expectancy in some parts of the
world to age 85.
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. The rate of increase of population will have
slackened*but, I suspect, not sufficiently.
One of the more serious exhibits at the 2014 World's Fair, accordingly,
will be a series of lectures, movies and documentary material at the
World Population Control Center (adults only; special showings for
teen-agers).
The situation will have been made the more serious by the advances of
automation. 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. Part of the General Electric
exhibit today consists of a school of the future in which such present
realities as closed-circuit TV and programmed tapes aid the teaching
process. It is not only the techniques of teaching that will advance,
however, but also the subject matter that will change. 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" (from
"formula translation").
Even so, mankind 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. The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of
any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more
than serve a machine.
Indeed, the most somber speculation I can make about A.D. 2014 is that
in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the
vocabulary will have become /work!/T
--
Clave PGP disponible en pgp.rediris.es (kylebofh@xxxxxxxxx)
pgp --keyserver pgp.rediris.es --recv-keys 19D41C02
Other related posts:
- » [bofhers] Espectacular artículo de Isaac Asimov en 1964: Predicciones acerca del 2014 - Kyle von Bofhlander
