We’re far behind Asimov’s vision

We must consider his tech predictions as a moral compass

George Orwell’s famous dystopian novel, 1984, turned 35 in the year 1984. To mark the occasion, the Toronto Star asked another famous writer to predict what the world might be like 35 years from then. Isaac Asimov, one of the world’s most famous science fiction writers, wrote about what he thought 2019 would look like at the start of that Orwellian year; and he wasn’t much off the mark. Even if Earth hasn’t managed to “live under the faint semblance of a world government by co-operation” or solve the industrial waste problem by shifting industry “in a wholesale manner” out to space, many predictions are almost eerily on point.

He foresaw the human race’s increasing reliance on computers and the “mobile computerized object” penetrating the home. He predicted a “vast change in the nature of education” and the need to teach everyone how to deal with a ““high-tech” world.” The “consequences of human irresponsibility” are another thing Asimov saw. Writing about waste and pollution, he saw how these consequences would have become “more apparent and unbearable”; but he believed that humans would have figured out a way to deal with it. He had hoped that our technologies would have helped reverse the deterioration of the environment. “Waste would not even remain in Earth’s vicinity, but would be swept outward far beyond the asteroid belt by the solar wind.” He believed that human beings would have found ways to “defeat overpopulation, pollution and militarism” by 2019; and that education would have been so revolutionised that it would “become fun because it will bubble up from within and not be forced in from without.” The other big miss is that Asimov’s famous robots (he is credited with having coined the term “robotics”) are not nearly as ubiquitous as he may have foreseen.

As a professor of biochemistry and a prolific science fiction writer, Asimov was at the cutting edge of science and technology. And as 1984 was dawning, the Cold War between the US and the USSR raged on, and nuclear war was a real threat. This meant that even if the communist dystopia of Orwell’s novel had been averted, another kind of dystopia seemed imminent. Today, 35 years since Asimov hoped humanity would have figured out better ways to deploy its technological prowess, his predictions are a moral compass, showing us where the path could have led, and where we might yet strive to go.