Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

[arethuza]

I really wish there was more information available on the meeting that Arthur C. Clarke, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien and some rocket boffin had in an Oxford pub to discuss the morality of interplanetary colonization - Lewis and Tolkien opposing, Clarke and Val Cleaver in favour.

Clarke wrote of the meeting:

Needless to say, neither side converted the other, and we refused to abandon our diabolical schemes of interplanetary conquest. But a fine time was had by all, and when, some hours later, we emerged a little unsteadily from the Eastgate, Dr. Lewis’s parting words were "I’m sure you are very wicked people but how dull it would be if everyone was good."

http://www.cthreepo.com/blog/2009/04/arthur-c-clarke-vs-c-s-...

[Edit: Link to some details on Val Cleaver: http://www.bis-space.com/what-we-do/the-british-interplaneta...]

[absconditus]

This is not entirely related, but Lewis and Tolkien belonged to an interesting group of authors who often held discussions at pubs near Oxford.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inklings

[Apocryphon]

Shame Heinlein didn't tag along.

[RyanMcGreal]

One of the things Clarke got wrong was his contention, expressed in at least a few of his books, that instant global telecommunications would eliminate the need for people to live in close proximity in cities. Despite the proliferation of low-density sprawl around many North American (and some European) cities, density is still a principal driver of innovation and big cities are, if anything, even bigger and denser than they were when Clarke made this prediction.

Edit to add - One more thing: in case anyone here doesn't already know, Clarke invented the concept of geostationary communications satellites in a 1945 article he wrote for Wireless World. http://lakdiva.org/clarke/1945ww/

[jerf]

Wait for robotic cars, and the subsequent explosion of time-shared rent-a-cars (imagine if ZipCars could be really truly computer-scheduled), robotic public transport and mixed transport (freely intermixing various transport types), even cheaper robotic delivery services, and the still-improving telepresence software and cheaper hardware. We're still at the beginning of that moreso than the end. Driving to the city half-an-hour away is annoying when it carves half-an-hour out of your day, but if you just click to order a car, get in and continue doing whatever it is you were doing before, and just arrive half-an-hour later it'll feel much less like it was An Event to go to the city. Or going from the city to something half-an-hour away.

[alex_stoddard]

"... big cities are, if anything, even bigger and denser than they were when Clarke made this prediction."

Big cities are definitely bigger and denser, see the BBC special report on urbanisation: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/world/06/urbanisation/...

[sasha-dv]

It appears he was wrong about it. If anything, the cities are not just getting bigger and denser, they are starting to "specialize". (Geeks tend to congregate in the SF area, investment bankers in the NY city, ...) Anyhow, he described the rest of the changes brought about by the revolution in telecommunication technology rather well.

Looking back it looks obvious, but I wonder how many people at that time agreed with his vision of the future? That brings the question, how many "Arthur C. Clarke"s lives today that we are dismissing as lunatics?

[wladimir]

He certainly got that wrong, at least for now.

However there may come a trend to move out of the cities sooner or later. For example even now a lot of people get tired of 'busy city life' and would like to move to the land and have some more space. If you can work remotely, why not.

[roldon332]

There is no need for me to live in a city. I work from home and telecommute. I travel to a city that is 45 minutes away for pleasure. He was 100% on from my perspective.

[hugh3]

Everybody in this discussion seems to be focusing on the problem of work, but how many of us would want to move out to some remote location even if we could perfectly telecommute?

I know I wouldn't. I'd go crazy being alone all the time, and video chat is a piss-poor substitute for actually being in a room with somebody, whether it's a friend or a colleague. Besides, I like the fact that within 20 minutes' drive of my house there's hundreds of restaurants, hundreds of bars, dozens of theaters, thousands of shops, et cetera.

[IdeaHamster]

City's have advantages independent of a location to work. For example, do you know where the individuals with the lowest carbon footprint in the entire USA live?

New York city.

[jseliger]

If you're curious about this, see Edward Glaeser's book Triumph of the City. Cities appear to promote knowledge dissemination and overflow better than other forms of living, which is why Manhattan rents have gone from basically reasonable in 1980 to insane today.

[cwe]

Virtual cities are just starting to form. Many other commenters have pointed out working remotely, but it is still in its infancy. Once fully immersive VR gets cheap/effective enough, and it's as common as iPhones, there will be no need whatsoever for people to physically be next to each other.

[stcredzero]

E. M. Forester (1 January 1879 – 7 June 1970) predicted the Internet. Right down to blogs, and the crappy compressed quality of many voice comms and video chat.

http://archive.ncsa.illinois.edu/prajlich/forster.html

[ojbyrne]

s/Forester/Forster/ please.

[SoftwareMaven]

Regarding ability to predict the future: There is a huge amount of survivor bias involved. Given how many people predicted incorrectly (just look at 1950s Pop Sci covers), somebody was bound to be somewhat correct. We only know his prediction because it came true; how many other predictions of his haven't?

Clarke was an amazing writer, and there is no question he had an eye for possible futures. I wish I could write half as well.

[diego_moita]

I found interesting that most predictions of the future always focus in the technological high-end.

For the very big majority of people in 1964 the really big change was moving from rural environments to the slums of Mexico City, Kinshasa, Mumbai or other 3rd world big town.

[ippisl]

That prediction by clarke means that today million of relatively poor indians work for companies in the U.S. and make better living.

[absconditus]

Another terribly interesting sci-fi author was Jules Verne. He made many predictions about the future in several of his works.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_in_the_Twentieth_Century#...

[estel]

There's a fuller version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT_8-pjuctM&feature=relat...

The next prediction gets a bit more far-fetched, by suggesting bio-engineering chimpanzees as some form of slave labour.

[mbyrne]

In 1964 he predicted the concept of ape slave labor which was the basis of the plot of the novel "La planète des singes" (Planet of the Apes) by Pierre Boulle printed in 1963.

[marquis]

He is a novelist at heart. On the communications, did this sound so far fetched? Long distance phone calling was available at the time.

[IdeaHamster]

Clarke was right, about the technology. He was, unfortunately but rather predictably, so very wrong about people's willingness to adopt the technology. Currently, I'm looking to move from one very large city to another, even larger, city and all I want is a job that is willing to let me work remote from my new home. Unfortunately, because the new city is not one of the "blessed" cities where people expect software developers to work, I'm having an extraordinarily difficult time finding a good opportunity.

Even when there is no financial reason, no technological reason, people are still, inherently, unfortunately wary about people working from "just anywhere"...

[drtse4]

He just didn't factor in some human tendencies that limit the adoption of the remote work model. To get around those another 50 years could not be enough.

[bgruber]

If you're actually interested in what Arthur C. Clarke thought about the future, may i suggest his book "Profiles of The Future", from whence we get Clarke's 3 laws, including the well-worn "any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic."

Not only does it contain lots of predictions like the ones in this video, but also fascinating analysis about the whole future-predicting business, including gems like this:

"Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties, if it is desired greatly enough."

[qq66]

It's not that hard to make predictions like this and have them be eventually confirmed true. In fact, the weakest predictions often seem the most prescient since they are achieved the farthest into the future.

I'll just go on the record here with flying cars, 300 year lifespans, portable holograms, human-embedded electronics that give superhuman sensory abilities, etc...

[spuz]

The site appears to be down. Here's a slightly more in-depth article from Singularity Hub from this time last year: http://singularityhub.com/2010/09/01/retro-futurism-arthur-c...

[danparsonson]

It's working here, but in any case, the crux of the article is this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOaZspeSBZU&feature=playe...

[WalterBright]

In Imperial Earth, Clarke's minisec pretty much describes the ipad.

[jimbokun]

Was that also the inspiration for the flat screen used to watch the BBC in 2001?

[ojbyrne]

The references to Clarke and Friedman in the same blog post makes me cringe. One is a writer, the other one isn't, by any critical metric.

[bluena]

So what are your predictions for 2050?

[sixtofour]

1. I'll be dead.

2. Government and corporate surveillance of the individual will be so common place that it will seem weird that people in the past went through most of their lives unobserved.

3. Corruption in American government will be beyond rampant, and no one will even bother to complain about it anymore. It will be almost like Indian society where individuals have to pay bribes for any government contact, except the bribery will still only be available to corporations and individuals rich enough to operate as corporations.

4. Access to health care/health insurance (they amount to the same thing here) will be worse than it is now, and we will still crow that ours is the best healthcare system in the world.

5. The reported unemployment numbers will be at or above 20%.

6. Public schools will have deteriorated so badly that only the poorest of families will educate their kids there. That group will however be more than 50% of kids.

7. The car culture will have disappeared. Most of us will use public transportation, which will cost about what it costs now to operate a car.

8. 2050 will be the Year of the Linux Desktop.

[astrofinch]

By 2050 we are likely to have achieved at least one of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence or sped up computer uploaded brains. If the resulting superhuman intelligence makes it a priority to make itself even smarter, it's very difficult to predict what will happen since we'd be predicting the actions of the being that's much smarter than we are.

http://intelligenceexplosion.com/primer.html

This is kind of like the futurist trump card--if it plays out, it will render predictions in many other fields (geopolitics, demographics, sociology and most kinds of technological advancement) null and void.

[cpeterso]

The US will have not have 50 states. Some states might secede, some states might split (e.g. Northern and Southern California), or some territories might be granted statehood (so their natural resources and cheap labor can be more readily extracted). Of course, some combination of the above could bring the state count full circle to 50, but I think that's unlikely.

[layzphil]

I guess it's a good thing he's been wrong about the equalisation of the sexes - both men and women may not commute today.

[philwelch]

I don't think he said anything about the equality of the sexes. In the 1960's it was still widely understood to use the term "men" to refer to human beings in general in this kind of context. In 1964 there were certainly many women in the workforce, albeit not in the same kinds of roles men had.

[sp332]

"Man"/"men" is the neuter (unsexed) pronoun for people in English. "He" is neuter for all animate objects (animals and people), and "she" is neuter for inanimate objects.