RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”