Smartphones, smart appliances, Mars probes, cars that drive themselves. Fifty years ago, at the opening of the World’s Fair, Isaac Asimov was invited by the New York Times to write a fund in which he was to imagine how the world would be a half-century later, at the World’s Fair of 2014. And the great science fiction author was able to describe some of the revolutions and trends that are now part of normal everyday life. Some things you missed, like to believe that people would be so bored to love the work as a form of entertainment. Or that there would be underwater colonies, to rid the world overcrowded. But on some predictions was incredibilente precise, he even put black-on-white the exact number of the inhabitants of the United States and the world: 350 million, respectively, and 6 and a half billion.
Asimov is perhaps the most famous and admired writer of science fiction, but they forget that he was also a scientist, who taught biochemistry at Boston University and also published books of scientific diffusion. So in predicting the future half a century later, probably relied more on his scientific knowledge that is not the imagination of the writer. In fact, he had published the great “I Robot”, you do not win by his own pages and provides rather than in the world of the future robots will not be “neither very common nor very efficient.” If anything, precise, there will be an advanced robotics application in small and large appliances. In fact describes sophisticated machines from the house and from the kitchen, like the coffee machine to program the night before to have a steaming cup to the clock, which is now commonplace in millions of American homes. He adds that there will be on sale and frozen ready meals to be heated at dinner time. Imagine a TV with big screen TV and 3D cinema, and especially the fact that there will be satellites that allow you to use the phone directly with all the places in the world without going through exchanges. Provides inter alia for the invention of cables capable of carrying data at very high speed (and in fact we have the fiber optic cables) and that our telephone communications will also include an image, such as smartphones. On phones in the future, he adds, “you can do research, read pages of books, take pictures.” Ensures that half a century later almost any electrical device will need a wire and a plug, but it will be portable. And that factories are automated and men organize their work mainly by programming the machines (computers?). All this may seem obvious today, but in 1964 imagined a smartphone with such precision was really science fiction . The United States was far dall’atterrare on the moon, yet Asimov writes, correctly, that 50 years later, NASA will be landed on Mars, but only with a probe. The cars were huge piles of sheet metal, unwieldy and cumbersome, and if Asimov was wrong in imagining that in our era they would have been raised in the air, however, is not wrong in saying that in 2014 “we will stand devoting a lot of effort” to create cars with a “robot brain”, which may “be programmed to take us to certain destinations without human interference of drivers’: Google is working on exactly this concept, the car that drives itself.However, the most dramatic prediction of the author scientist is that the technology will push the man “to turn away more and more from nature.” It is not enough also provides the digital divide, the gap between the people who have easy access to technology and those who remain behind. And the gap, he warns, will condemn these communities to “slip back even more.”
Asimov wrote imagining what a World’s Fair of 2014 he presented to the public. In fact, a fair of 2014 is not expected. The next meeting will be held in a year in fact, in 2015, in Milan. And who knows if someone is not thinking to create a booth dedicated to predictions that Asimov had well-aimed 50 years ago
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