>>1015309 (OP)
This story run through Tesseract, for anyone who doesn't want to click on the link:
35 years ago, Isaac Asimov was asked by the
Star to predict the world of 2019. Here is what
he wrote
By ISAAC ASIMOV Special to The Star
Thu., Dec. 27, 2018
fvVMe
Originally published Dec. 31, 1983
If we look into the world as it may be at the end of another generation, let’s say 2019 — that’s 35 years from now, the same
number of years since 1949 when George Orwell’s 1984 was first published — three considerations must dominate our
thoughts:
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.” (MONDADORI PORTFOLIO)
1. Nuclear war. 2. Computerization. 8. Space utilization.
If the United States and the Soviet Union flail away at each other at any time
between now and 2019, there is absolutely no use to discussing what life will be
like in that year. Too few of us, or of our children and grand- children, will be
alive then for there to be any point in describing the precise condition of global
misery at that time.
Letus, therefore, assume there will be no nuclear war — not necessarily a safe
assumption — and carry on from there.
Computerization will undoubtedly continue onward inevitably. Computers
have already made themselves essential to the governments of the industrial
nations, and to world industry: and it is now beginning to make itself
comfortable in the home.
Read more: Isaac Asimov, you were no Nostradamus
Anessential side product, the mobile computerized object, or robot, is already flooding into industry and will, in the course
of the next generation, penetrate the home.
There is bound to be resistance to the march of the computers, but barring a successful Luddite revolution, which does not
seem in the cards, the march will continue.
The growing complexity of society will make it impossible to do without them, except by courting chaos; 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
computerization as they now clamour for weapons.
The immediate effect of intensifying computerization will be, of course, to change utterly our work habits. This has
happened before.
Before the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of humanity was engaged in agriculture and indirectly allied professions.
After industrialization, the shift from the farm to the factory was rapid and painful. With computerization the new shift from
the factory to something new will be still more rapid and in consequence, still more painful.
It isnot that computerization 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’tbe true now, too.
However, the jobs created are not identical with the jobs that have been destroyed, and in similar cases in the past the
change has never been so radical.
Destroying our minds
The jobs that will disappear will tend to be just those routine clerical and assembly-line jobs that are simple enough,
repetitive enough, and stultifying enough to destroy the finely balanced minds of those human beings unfortunate enough
to have been forced to spend years doing them in order to earna living, and yet complicated enough to rest above the
capacity of any machine that is neither a computer nor computerized.
It is these that computers and robots for which they are perfectly designed will take over.