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. Complete lunches and dinners, with the food semiprepared, will be stored in the freezer until ready for processing.
Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.
Large solar-power stations will also be in operation in a number of desert and semi-desert areas.
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.
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.
The 2014 fair will feature an Algae Bar at which “mock-turkey” and “pseudosteak” will be served. It won’t be bad at all, but there will be considerable psychological resistance to such an innovation.
So, let’s review:
- Frozen dinners.
- Skype and video chat.
- Google driverless cars.
- Fake meat.
- Smart phones.
It’s worth noting that not all of his predictions were accurate, but the number that were – or were at least in the right ballpark – is damn impressive.
I wouldn’t at all mind his lifetime-duration isotype batteries and fusion power plants; both would be pretty handy in our increasingly energy-starved world. I am, also, bitter about the lack of moon colonies I was totally promised as a kid.
Asimov was, as well, very close to his estimates of the U.S. and world populations (he was a little under the world population and a little over the U.S. population), and as today, it was this that he seemed most concerned about.
By Isaac Asimov via New York Times.