The Future Ain't What It Used To Be

I've obviously dedicated most of my writing career to crime and mystery fiction, and as you might expect I read a great deal of work in that field growing up.  I also had a deep love for science fiction, though, and while I've read relatively little new work in the genre in the last few decades, as a kid I delighted in the classics by the giants of the field--Asimov, LeGuin, Silverberg, and so on.  Recently, going through a box of books from my childhood home, I came across an interesting artifact by another of those giants, Arthur C. Clarke, probably best remembered today as the author of 2001.  I thought it worth looking at, both as an example of the perils of writers imagining the future and as a lens on the world writers are working in today.

In 1986, Clarke published a book titled July 20, 2019.  The date, of course, is the 50^th anniversary of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, and the book is a series of essays in which Clarke predicts what the world would look like in that then far-off year.  I bought and read the book when it came out.  I don't remember what I thought of it then, but reading it now, almost six years beyond the date Clarke chose for his prophecy, was certainly eye-opening.

So how did Clarke do with his predictions?

Well, there are a few hits.  He thought that the field I work in, distance education, would be huge, though he assumed it would operate via teleconferencing rather than being online (more on this later) and largely text-based.  He said that cars would still be much the same and still mostly gas-powered, though he thought they'd get 100 miles per gallon.  He thought entertainment would reflect an increasingly fragmented culture with more books, movies, music and so on aimed at specialized audiences, and he predicted the boom in self-publishing as part of that.  He was right about shortened hospital stays and the fact that medicine would still be largely controlled by corporations, though he didn't seem to give much thought to the social implications of the rich having care most people can't afford.

There are, however, far more misses, some amusing, some depressing.  Examples:

SPACE.  Clarke believed that by 2019 there would be a permanent manned outpost on the moon with perhaps as many as 1000 inhabitants.  There would be several manned orbiting space stations as well, and we would be routinely mining asteroids and preparing the first manned mission to Mars, with an eye to exploring the outer solar system.  He discussed in detail several conceptual engine ideas then being theorized which could cut the voyage to the red planet from months to a few weeks.  It's interesting to contemplate how much of this might have happened if NASA had gotten, say, a third of what the US has spent on the military since 1986.  Incidentally, earthbound transportation in Clarke's 2019 is similarly advanced, with magnetic trains and advanced hovercraft linking cities and jets that go from Shanghai to Los Angeles in two hours.

A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies

SPORTS.  Clarke predicted that steroids, hormones and other chemical enhancements would be made so safe that there would no longer be any reason to ban them from competition.  In addition, many athletes would have cybernetic parts, or even nerves cloned from legendary competitors to improve reaction time.  Elite athletes would be identified through genetic testing by the age of five and spend much of the rest of their lives being rigorously trained, using computers designed to enforce the most efficient way to perform any motion.  In baseball, for example, batters using boron bats would routinely hit home runs, though the fences had been moved to 500 feet from home plate.  They would do this facing pitchers who could throw 125 mph and pitch every other day.  The NBA would have to raise its hoops to 12 feet and make them smaller, since the average player would be over eight feet tall.

Offered without comment

THE MIND.  Clarke had little patience for the idea of therapy.  He thought that, by 2019, genetic mapping and brain imaging would make it possible to produce a vaccine preventing schizophrenia, drugs to prevent highly specific phobias and complexes, and compounds that would induce any desired mood.  For example, there would be a drug whose only effect is to enhance music appreciation, which would be routinely taken before attending any concert.

OK, maybe there's something to that one

ROBOTS.  Clarke would have been stunned to know there are still people making their living as coal miners today.  One of his most confident predictions was that virtually every job involving elements of danger or drudgery would have been taken over by robots well before 2019.  He honestly didn't think there would any longer be people working in factories, aside from very occasional repairs and inspections.  He also thought that most homes would have robots to handle routine domestic chores, and he dedicates considerable thought to how home design would emphasize simplicity and reduce clutter to make it easier for the robots to get around.  Clarke is very clearly NOT thinking of computers, but of humanoid robots.  He honestly thought they would be everywhere.  On the other hand . . . 

Rest easy, humans

COMPUTERS.  Clarke vastly overestimated the importance of the individual computer, and vastly underestimated the importance of computer networks.  He correctly assumed computers would be everywhere, in every home and every workplace, by 2019.  But while he occasionally mentions computers communicating with each other to share information for specific purposes, he still thought of every computer as an essentially distinct unit that learns to master the skills and demands of its particular job and function.  The idea that the computer would be connected to others essentially all the time, and that it would be useful only to the extent this is true, simply never occurs to him.  Thus he could not predict anything resembling Facebook, or Google, or Twitter, or Wikipedia, or Amazon, or the internet itself as it has come to exist.  Nor does he ever imagine anything resembling a smartphone--which might seem odd, from the man who, shortly after WWII, correctly predicted the creation of communication satellites.  This one oversight is so fundamental that it touches nearly everything else in the book, making it much less accurate than it might have been.  There's simply no way to understand almost anything actually happening in 2019 (or 2025) without taking account of the web.

Clearly, he did know there were dangers

GEOPOLITICS.  Again, Clarke was oddly short-sighted here.  He assumed the fundamental structure of world politics in 2019 would still be based on a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact contending with a US/UK-led NATO, with the front lines in a still-divided Germany.  There is virtually no mention in the book of Asia, Africa, or South America, let alone any notion that nations like China and India would be emerging superpowers that would shape much of the 21st century.  Weirdly, despite his ambitious claims for robots elsewhere, he envisions war still being conducted by human operators in planes and tanks; drones are another invention he did not foresee.  Something else he didn't mention, though it will dominate our lives for the foreseeable future: climate change.  Scientists by 1986 were well aware of this coming crisis, but Clarke never mentions it.  Perhaps he assumed the problem would have been solved, given his surprising degree of faith in  …

Not pictured: ice

 HUMAN NATURE.  It's hard to fault Clarke for this: he assumed that humanity, as a whole, would make decisions which might be self-interested, but which would be basically rational and fact-based.  He'd be dismayed to know that, more than fifty years after the first moonwalk, there are a substantial number of people who simply refuse to believe it ever happened because our teaching of science, math and critical thinking has become woefully inadequate.  He didn't foresee the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, the rise in racism and xenophobia, the spread of terrorism, or the willful embrace of ignorance that defines so much of our politics.  I truly wish that as a species we had lived up to the potential he saw in us.

Arthur C. Clarke