Your Favorite Futurist Is Wrong

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Nobody knows the future. This may seem like an obvious statement, but it bears repeating. Nobody knows the future.

Most people can generally accept this idea. But when it comes to our favorite prognosticator, we often put blinders on. Futurism is an imperfect craft in which the most earnest and educated individual must practice a fair amount of hand-wavy illusion building to even begin the process of prediction. When it comes to futurist-minded people that we like, we're more willing to remember their hits and forget their misses.

I've done a few radio interviews this month about Isaac Asimov's 1964 predictions for the world of 2014. Everyone wants to know: was Asimov right or was he wrong? And the answer isn't so simple. Like any vision of the future, even the "accurate" predictions are open to interpretation. And your take on their accuracy probably tracks closely with whether you're a fan of the man and his work.

From Asimov's 1964 New York Times article:

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.

There are a thousand different ways to slice and dice this prediction. On its face, this prediction is spot on. But that assessment comes with the biases any person living here in the early 21st century might bring to the table.

A generous reading of this prediction will say that he predicted Skype-like technology. A more skeptical reading of this prediction will look at the dozens of landline videophone predictions from the 1950s and 60s not to mention the real-world research being done at Bell Labs and conclude that Asimov was simply repeating a common futurist trope. And that by omitting mention of the infrastructure that would deliver sight-sound telephones the internet he really missed the mark.

People have gotten quite defensive about the way that I've analyzed Asimov's predictions. And I understand why. People love Asimov. We're infinitely more forgiving of the people we love, even if we didn't know them personally. That's the nature of fandom.

But I've tried to put Asimov's predictions in the context of the early 1960s, and in so doing have pointed out that his ideas were actually pretty conservative for the time. Conservative, in the sense that he hedges many of his bets with little caveats.

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Your Favorite Futurist Is Wrong