Stefan Mileschin

Issac Asimov’s predictions for 2019

In 1983, American writer Isaac Asimov wrote that by 2019, “It is quite likely that society, then, will have entered a phase that may be more or less permanently improved over the situation as it now exists”.

Writing for Insight magazine, Asimov said that if the Russians and Americans had not stopped being twats and blown up the world computerisation will undoubtedly continue onward inevitably.

“Computers have already made themselves essential to the governments of the industrial nations, and world industry: and it is now beginning to make itself comfortable in the home”, he said.

He predicted that the mobile computerised object, or robot, which was “already flooding into the industry” and will, in the course of the next generation, penetrate the home.

Asimov warned that there would be resistance to the march of the computers, but barring a successful Luddite revolution, which was unlikely, the march will continue.

He thought that society would become so complex that it would be impossible to do without computers and those parts of the world that fall behind in this respect will suffer so obviously as a result that their ruling bodies will clamour for computerisation as they now clamour for weapons.

“It is not that computerisation is going to mean fewer jobs as a whole, for technological advance has always, in the past, created more jobs than it has destroyed, and there is no reason to think that won’t be true now, too”, he said.

The jobs created will not be the same as the jobs that have been destroyed, and in similar cases, in the past, the change has never been so radical.

Jobs that will go are the routine clerical and assembly line jobs that are simple enough.

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