In many ways, the world may seem more like 1984 today than it did in 1984.
Electronic surveillance of our every keystroke. Shifting international alliances. Authoritarian risings. Fake News!
The dystopian world that George Orwell imagined 35 years before the year 1984 seems closer to today’s reality than it did in his 1949 book’s namesake year.
But on Dec. 31, 1983 — as the world was about to ring in that Orwellian year — another noted author took a crack at predicting what the world would look like a further 35 years hence, in 2019. And how well science fiction writer Isaac Asimov did in that Toronto Star special can now be examined as that year dawns.
Asimov — who died in 1992 — predicated all his New Year’s Eve forecasts on the assumption that the world could avert a nuclear war in the coming decades. And even as the intervening Cold War thaw appears to be refreezing — with a new nuclear arms race in the offing — our species did manage to avoid annihilation.
Thus we survive to gauge the accuracy of Asimov’s predictions in his other two essay themes: computerization and space utilization.
And it appears he was no Nostradamus.
For example, while he did predict there would be a space station up and running by 2019, planning for that international effort had been underway for years by the time of his writing.
Outside of some unmanned probes, however, the station was as far afield as humans would venture into the heavens over the next three and a half decades. And his fanciful visions of large mining projects on the moon — let alone the massive, orbiting structures they’d provide materials for — seem loony in hindsight.
On computers, he was equally hit-and-miss, says York University computer scientist Zbigniew Statchniak.
To be fair, Statchniak says, computing was advancing at such a speed as 1984 dawned that predicting where it might go would have been next to impossible.
“Having said that,” he adds, “I think he got easy things right and difficult things wrong.”
On the easy side, with the exception of smartphones, the forerunners of all the computer platforms we use today were well established by the mid-1980s, says Statchniak, the curator of York’s computer museum.
“We had everything, we had laptops, we had hand-held computers, we had digital assistants” as well as desktops, he says. “We had budding social media … and though there was no World Wide Web, there was internet and some of us [computer experts] were already surfing in a limited form.”
Thus Asimov’s forecast of a world awash in computers that would fundamentally alter the way we worked and lived was and a fairly easy call, Statchniak says. “Everything was there,” he says.
But Statchniak says Asimov — who purportedly coined the term robotics — was ironically and flamboyantly off with his android auguring.
“He paints a utopian vision, saying more and more human beings will find themselves living a life rich in leisure — the concept that robots will free us from tedious things,” Statchniak says. “He paints a picture of us lying on the sofa, or maybe driving a self-driving car, drinking wine, eating grapes, and robots will be doing everything for us.”
Statchniak says Asimov also failed to properly address the hard questions that the advances he foresaw, in robotics and artificial intelligence, should have raised in his agile mind.
“He’s not going deep enough in speculating what would happen if indeed robots would be everywhere,” he says. “If they are intelligent what will happen? If they are self-conscious what will happen — that’s an interesting ethical issue.”
Asimov also puts forward the notion that, guided by teachers who encouraged their particular muses, children could be left alone with their computers to chart their own studies — rather than, say, study “Super Mario” or sext their classmates.
“I’ve taught for too many years to know that that will never happen,” Statchniak says.
But computer scientist Eugene Fiume gives Asimov more credit for his predictions on the way computers would disrupt old orders, and the new ones they’d create.
“It was less about the technology, which I think any astute observer would have seen in 1984,” says Fiume, dean of applied sciences at Simon Fraser University in B.C.
“It was his observations regarding human dynamics and politics, particularly his prediction of a digital divide, as well as a huge need for re-education, which I guess we now call ‘upskilling,’ ” he says in an email exchange.
Fiume says Asimov was particularly sharp on the future of computer education.
“This may be his best and least obvious prediction. In 1984, there were many computer science departments at universities, but the programs in CS departments were for specialists,” he says.
“Asimov saw that such knowledge must become pervasive in society. Very astute! We still haven’t got a good handle on that, largely because the huge demands for specialists have made it difficult to accommodate broader literacy.”
And Fiume, a former chair of computer science at the University of Toronto, says his thoughts on these types of “third- and fourth-order effects” of computer advances represent the biggest predictive hits in Asimov’s essay.
“His biggest miss was not recognizing that with exponential increases in computing speed, there also came exponential increases in data storage and in communications bandwidth,” Fiume says.
But he says ultimately, the author’s science outscored the fiction.
“All told, quite brilliant, really.”