This cherry-picked the predictions which seem to have come true, and omits many of the duds.
It doesn't mention "The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes"
Nor does it mention "Jets of compressed air will also lift land vehicles off the highways, which, among other things, will minimize paving problems".
Nor "2014 will see a good beginning made in the colonization of the continental shelves."
Or, when it talks about automatic coffee makers, it omits the full context "... next heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on." So in this sense Asimov correctly predicted the electric drip coffee maker of the 1970s, but the others are failures.
It's also a stretch to classify ITER as an "experimental fusion-power plant". ITER is a fusion reactor, yes, but it's not a power plant. ITER sets the groundwork for such a plant, currently called DEMO, but with only a vague idea that it might start operations in 2033.
Sigh, mainstream atomic batteries would be so cool... :-(
But:
>>"experimental fusion-power plant"
Last I read, General Fusion talks about a quite serious prototype for their steam driven power plant in 2014. They seem to have many of the possible show stoppers already solved.
Of course, if the GF approach works they are a few years away from a working system. But before ITER goes online for testing... (The readiness of the other contenders in alternative fusion -- Polywell, Tri Alpha, etc -- are harder to evaluate.)
Nobody has come within several orders of magnitude of net-energy-positive (by which I mean for the whole process, not narrowly "more energy than was actually absorbed by the fusing particles") fusion so far. The idea that General Fusion is going to this year is fantasy.
And even your article suggests that they hope to start building a full size prototype in 2014, but they don't expect to finish until 2017.
Britain's JET is not orders of magnitude below net-positive output. I don't have the exact number here, but I believe they are near the 75% mark. The US NIF facility reached net-positive for a brief period last year [1]. ITER is projected to be net-positive at about 10x.
The tech is not here, but it isn't orders of magnitude away either.
They approximate that the actual energy input into the process at NIF (as opposed to "absorbed by the particles") was 422 MJ in for 14 kJ out. That's roughly 4 orders of magnitude.
I can easily concede that NIF results are too recent and still under scrutiny. However, JET's peak output was 65% of input, and these are results solid enough to justify scaling JET up with the ITER project. 65% is on the same order of magnitude, not four orders of magnitude away.
I know it was for a short period, but 0.5 seconds is enough to prove the concept, and this was the objective then. They did another experiment at a quarter of the output for five seconds, and both were limited by the design of the tokamak not targeting long runs (it's a scientific reactor).
I know this is now a pretty dead thread, but just FYI: you're again looking at the comparison of power output to "power absorbed by the particles to be fused," not power output to overall system power input.
All the fusion people are so far from being energy positive to overall system power input, and so far from even trying to get to that milestone, that it's a little hard to find articles that talk about the power input to the whole system. But, to use wikipedia, here's a link:
Note that they talk about Q. JET claims a Q of approximately 0.7. Q=1 is what you're talking about -- more energy out of the particles than is absorbed by the particles. Q=5 is potentially self-sustaining -- because, in this case, only 20% of the energy out is in a form that can create more fusion reactions. The article suggests Q=10 as the minimum for overall power output. My guess is that Q=10 is wildly optimistic for that.
You're not contradicting that they are starting a prototype of the real thing. That is, as you make a point of, quite new.
If that (and/or Polywell et al) will really work out is a bit early to say. The GF people claim to have solved the basic problems, bent a lot of metal already and are getting serious investments.
The article justifies the correctness of "experimental fusion-power plant" by pointing to ITER. My objection is that ITER is not an experimental fusion-power plant.
While there are other contenders, I'll point out that link you gave says "full-size prototype reactor" and "Pumped through a heat exchanger, that hot lead will help generate steam just like a conventional thermal power plant". It does not say this is a power reactor, nor does it say if there will be net positive energy, nor if most of the energy for the steam will come from conventional power used to generate the plasma in the first place.
Asimov wrote "And [sic] experimental fusion-power plant or two will already exist in 2014". That's not going to exist by the end of this year. I call it a failed prediction.
They will start to build a (full size iirc) prototype of a net energy fusion reactor this year.
It is not exactly what Asimov predicted, but if the GF power plants works and is economical, it is closer to actual fusion power plants than what was predicted (the parts of real reactors could be made in factories, in a way that Ford would recognize; it could scale up quickly to lots of places. No one really thought that likely even a dozen years ago).
That could well be. However, the link you gave doesn't say that it will be a prototype of a net energy fusion reactor, only that it will be a fusion reactor, and that they haven't yet achieved net energy, though they had hoped to do so by last year. "Getting it to work repeatedly and cost effectively for power production, that’s harder."
I presume you know this information from elsewhere. I judge based only on the information I read in that link.
Look at "where we are going", second image from the top.
"Full Scale, Net Gain Prototype
In the next phase of development, General Fusion will be constructing a full scale prototype system. The prototype will be designed for single pulse testing, demonstrating full net energy gain on each pulse, a world first."
Click the arrow -- it says "GOAL: Fusion energy released is 6x the piston energy input"
(I upvoted you for successful trolling. But please stop that.)
You may say that I'm trolling, or quibbling over an irrelevant nuance. I don't think I am. I believe I am trying to keep true to the intent of Asimov's prediction.
I pointed out that "full size prototype fusion reactor" is not the same thing as "experimental fusion-power plant" which is what Asimov claimed would be here by 2014.
(Chicago Pile #1 was a nuclear reactor. The Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant and BORAX-III were nuclear power plants. There's a big difference between a reactor and a reactor which can be used as an experimental power plant.)
The General Fusion link you gave still doesn't say it will be a fusion power reactor, only that it will be a fusion reactor. Yes, it says "6x the piston energy input", but that's not the same as "6x the input energy."
Elsewhere on the site: General Fusion’s Magnetized Target Fusion system uses a sphere, filled with molten lead-lithium that is pumped to form a vortex. On each pulse, magnetically-confined plasma is injected into the vortex.
How much extra energy is needed to keep the lead-lithium melted, how much energy is needed for the pumps, how much is needed for cooling, etc.? From the information I've read - and thank you for the pointers - I can't conclude that it's a going to be a net energy fusion reactor, in the sense that Asimov meant for an "experimental fusion-power plant."
Or, put it this way - do you consider Chicago Pile #1 as an experimental nuclear power plant? If so, then the source of our difference is in what "power plant" means. If not, then what's the difference between a nuclear reactor and a nuclear power plant, and what was the first experimental nuclear power plant?
>> How much extra energy is needed to keep the lead-lithium melted
You misunderstand. The energy from the fusion is taken up by the molten lead -- which is then used in a heat exchanger, like the present fission reactors etc.
(The steam pistons also get their energy from the created heat. It seems unlikely that accelerating all those steam pistons won't be the major energy cost in the system, but sure -- pumping lead is hardly easy. But five times more than the pistons?)
So the thing missing from an experimental power plant is a heat exchanger, like fission etc power plants. (And sure, lead is less fun than water!)
I assume THAT is what you missed and assumed was a major problem?
From what I've read, the proposed experimental system will (if it works) not be built to last for long, it is experimental. But again -- the energy system needed for this to be an experimental power plant is very similar to most other power plants that work by heating a medium. Work has been done on much worse than lead (see liquid sodium!).
(About not being built to last: There are lots of moving parts, but those should probably not be a show stopper; boat engine pistons work for quite a while.)
I don't misunderstand. There's heat flow loss out of the body of the reactor. How much is this loss, compared to the amount generated?
What I'm missing are numbers: how much power do they expect to generate from fusion, how much power do they think it will take to run the full prototype system, and what's the operating temperature; ideally as part of a Sankey diagram. I think this isn't available because they simply don't know.
Again I ask, was Chicago Pile #1 a nuclear power plant? If not, what was the first nuclear power plant, and what distinguishes a power plant from other sorts of nuclear reactors? I think it must generate at least enough power to be be self-sustaining to qualify as a power plant. I therefore believe this General Fusion system, when built, will be an experimental fusion reactor used to develop the principles leading to a fusion power plant, but will not itself be a fusion power plant, experimental or otherwise.
BTW, the Wikipedia page says "They hope to have a working reactor by 2020", which is of course 6 years after Asimov's prediction. The WP does not give a source for that information.
First I'll note that the remaining problems seems to be engineering more than plasma physics -- and most of the show stoppers seems to be solved. If that don't make you go "wow", well...
>>what distinguishes a power plant from other sorts of nuclear reactors?
Again: I argued the main difference here is connecting a heat exchanger, you had nothing to say?
>>What I'm missing are numbers: how much power do they expect to generate from fusion
Again: The target is 6X the used energy for the pistons, according to the presentation. (It is a private company, details for investors.)
(You know the number of pistons, their size/speed. That should be enough to make a good guess on the target energy from fusion. You can also guess quite well the volume of the lead and hence wuite a bit of the pumping needs.)
There are other GF sources on the internet over the last few years, but since you ignore what I write please check them yourself.
My apologies. I did overlook your mention of a heat exchanger as being the requirement for a power reactor.
To me a heat exchanger is something which moves heat from one medium to the other, and is not necessarily part of power production. The radiator in a car is a heat exchanger, and not a power generator. Thus, I did not understand your viewpoint.
Quoting from the first link you gave: "Pumped through a heat exchanger, that hot lead will help generate steam just like a conventional thermal power plant". Thus, I consider it as not a power plant, because it only produces steam. While I see that you consider the production of steam to be sufficient, likely because it reduces the issue to a previously solved problem.
I am satisfied that the General Fusion design, which hasn't even started, is not a nuclear fusion power plant of the sort that Asimov predicted would be available by 2014. That is my primary interest in this discussion.
> However, if the company can pull off its test reactor, it hopes to attract enough attention to easily raise the $500 million for a demonstration power plant.
Note how that magazine author also distinguishes between "test reactor" and "demonstration power plant"?
The information I found are not sufficient to make the estimates that you mentioned. For example, while I found pictures of the small sphere experimental setup, and a mention that the final velocity is 50 m/s, I did not find learn the mass of the piston, or equivalently the amount of power used to drive it. Nor did I find out how much power goes into the plasma injectors. There are images of some pretty hefty capacitor banks, but I couldn't tell if they are discharged at once, or if they are rotated through in order to lengthen the charge time for any one bank of capacitors.
Estimating the pumping needs is very complicated. I found no reference of what the internal surface of the sphere looks like. If liquid extends into each piston then there well be turbulence at each interface, causing power loss. Even if it's laminar, I still need to know the rotational speed.
The depictions I've seen show that the lead surface is a near cylinder, which means a very high speed, as the natural shape of a rotating fluid is a parabola. Assuming 0.25 meter radius for the upper part of the cylinder and a height of 3 meters gives 400-500 Hz. That seems rather a lot, given that they're talking about some 50 cubic meters of lead, or 500 tons, moving at some 2,000 m/s.
(I used the equation for a liquid mirror telescope: h = 1/(2g) * (omega * r) ^ 2. Hopefully I didn't calculate it incorrectly.)
Since the information I've found doesn't make sense, either my math is wrong, or the information I've found is incomplete. Since you are the one who believes that this is a near-term power plant, then surely you must have worked out these details already, or read them some place. That is, how fast is the molten lead mixture supposed to rotate, and how much energy is needed to keep it at that speed?
Again: I used the term "full sized prototype" in the first comment. Which is not exactly what Asimov wrote. The remaining possible show stoppers are less plasma physics and more mechanical, which is certainly better than what Asimov predicted.
(I wrote repeatedly that the main thing missing from the planned prototype to be a prototype power plant is a heat exchanger, like most every other power plant that heats a medium. It boggles incredibility to assume you failed reading that.)
Your link is from 2009, when they were new to building experimental hardware. Hardly an authoritative reference.
Thank you for the find for #1. I am pleased and surprised to see that my back-of-the-envelope calculation on the speed is correct. I am still gob-smacked to think of that much lead spinning a 2km/sec. I don't have the knowledge of supersonic fluid flows to be able to evaluate that. The paper itself points out various difficulties, including delamination, decavitation, jet formation with speeds up to 6km/sec, and:
> practically generating shocks mechanically at Mach numbers greater than 1.5 without destroying the machine that creates them (as is the focus of this work) seems challenging. For example, a steel piston impacting liquid lead to produce an approximately Mach 1.1 shock would see a compressive stress of approximately 2 GPa, well above the yield stress of most steels.
The paper talks about pressures up to 400 GPa. Another back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests 20 GPa of centrifugal force at the equator, which of course means the pumps need all the more force. This is well beyond a regime where I can make any mechanical estimates.
At this point I suggest that the biggest problem is the engineering to bring the lead up to speed, keeping the sphere in shape with that much force on it, generating a plasma collapse through all of that, and connecting everything to the heat exchanger. That will be a huge challenge in its own right, and must be solved before I would call it an experimental power plant.
BTW, this vortex simulation is from 2008, ... "hardly an authoritative reference" by your own criterion. ;) Indeed, I note that the simulation says 100 kg pistons impacting at 100 m/s, while this 2012 PDF http://fire.pppl.gov/FPA12_Richardson_GF.pdf says the target impact velocity is 50 m/s, which is 1/4th the total amount of energy.
Link #2 directs me to http://generalfusion.com/downloads/ICC2008_MGL.pdf, which shows that in 2008 they indeed planned on a 100 m/s impact, so parameters from 2008 are obviously no longer valid for 2014.
>> I am still gob-smacked to think of that much lead spinning a 2km/sec.
That is NOT the value for the spin speed. The paper says:
"The collapse of the cavity is accelerated by geometric
focusing, resulting in cavity wall velocities over 2 km/s at the end stages of
collapse"
The spin speed -- think centrifuge, as in a washing machine or in a chemical lab. Lead is high density, but you'd hardly need 2 km/s (around 12K RPMs!!). That is ridiculous.
(I do think I've seen articles on that the demands on the pistons might be smaller than the first calculations, after experiments. The self reinforcing shock wave might be involved.)
Edit: If you really need to estimate the spin speed, this should work? Consider how many G you'd need at the inner part of the evacuated tube. Then check that on some online calculation (there is a simple formula) to get the RPM (and hence speed) instead of trying the "back of the envelope" thing... :-)
Edit 2: I googled a page with the G formula for RPMs. 0.2 meter empty in the middle at 1000 RPMs gives 112 G which should be <cough> more than ample. :-) The formula use (RPM/1000)², so 12,000 RPMs... I don't even want to think about > 1400 G on tons of lead!! http://clinfield.com/2012/07/how-to-convert-centrifuge-rpm-t...
That is the value for the spin speed. Quoting from the paper, 4 paragraphs after the 2km/s you referenced:
> Probably the most signi cant feature of the flow in the concept reactor is that it involves a compressible liquid. With flow velocities exceeding 2 km/s and pressures reaching 400 GPa, compressibility is unavoidable.
"Flow" refers to the spin speed, not the collapse.
Like I said earlier, I used the equation for a liquid mirror telescope -- h = 1/(2g) * (omega * r) ^ 2 -- for my '"back of the envelope" thing.' See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_mirror_telescope for the full derivation.
Using h = 2.7 m, g = 9.8m/s, and r = 0.20m gives 40 Hz (or 2,400 rpm). Note though that this gives 20 cm at the top, and 0cm at the bottom. It's a paraboloid, so the center is probably 14-15 cm across. Thus, 40 Hz is a lower bound.
Using 40 Hz in (2 * pi * 1.5m) * 40/s implies a minimum equatorial speed of 380m/s, which is Mach 1. The equatorial pumps of course must be providing fluid at an even higher speed. The g-forces at the equator, 1.5 meters away, are even larger than the g-forces at the surface 20 cm away. a = r * omega^2 = 1.5m * 1600/s/s = 2500 G.
To get a more uniform evacuated center requires higher speeds still, but the formula I used (first discovered by Newton, btw), no longer holds. It will likely need to be several times faster. Flow speeds of 2km/s require only 6 times faster than the minimum possible speed, which sounds reasonable. Even if 2km/s doesn't sound reasonable.
I don't think General Fusion has done the engineering testing to show that they can actually construct one of these, much less use it to provide power.
>> Quoting from the paper, 4 paragraphs after the 2km/s you referenced
The paper doesn't even discuss what you claim. This is the paragraph before the one you quoted:
"There are several important flows in the concept MTF reactor. However, this
work focuses only on the compressible aspects. Consequently, issues such as
the vortex formation and cycling lead through the reactor to generate steam
are left to follow up work by General Fusion."
I do think you know you are misrepresenting the content of the paper.
Your calculations are derived from a mild parabola, I'm not going to bother looking up where the formula fails. We're talking about a globe, which must change this drastically. Which I frankly also think you're aware of.
AGAIN: 10+G in a centrifuge would certainly put any liquid against the wall. And already 1000 RPMs @ 20 cm is > 110G! (See reference in previous comment.)
After your misrepresentation of the paper above and forcing me to repeat trivial points repeatedly I'm not going to bother with the differing results from your math or how it might be applicable to a sphere.
Based on your responses, I can only conclude that you have neither an engineering nor physics background.
I quote from the abstract:
> An Eulerian compressible flow solver suitable for simulating liquid-lead flows
involving fluid-structure interaction, cavitation and free surfaces was developed and applied to investigation of a magnetized target fusion reactor concept. The numerical methods used and results of common test cases are presented. Simulations were then performed to assess the smoothing properties of interacting mechanically generated shocks in liquid lead, as well as the early-time collapse behavior of cavities due to free surface reflection of such shocks.
That's three parts. 1) fluid-structure interaction, 2) effects of shocks, and 3) collapse behavior. I'm discussing part #1, which mentions 2 km/s fluid flows. There's also part #3, which includes jets up to 6 km/s.
It's a compressible flow solver because liquid lead compresses at those pressures. That's why the author talks about "Probably the most significant feature of the flow in the concept reactor is that it involves a compressible liquid" and why the author later goes on to develop the equation of state for liquid lead, including a term for cavitation effects.
You might have confused it with compressing the plasma. But plasma compression isn't covered until "cavity collapse" on page 71.
You wrote "Your calculations are derived from a mild parabola."
Yes, of course it's a parabola. The free surface of all bulk liquids in a system with constant rotation forms a paraboloid. That's what the physics says. Why do you think otherwise?
In this case it's also a "mild" parabola. That's why it's the minimum bound for a solution.
The fact that this is a rotating sphere instead of cylinder doesn't change anything. The free surface is a consequence of the centripetal force balancing out potential gravitational energy, not the shape of the container it's in.
For some reason you think using a sphere "must change this drastically", but you offer no explanation. The counter-proof to your supposition is very simple. For all but thin-films, the surface has no way to know the shape of the container. It can't tell if it's in a cylinder or a sphere. Indeed, if you replaced the lead that's more than 30cm away from the rotation axis with a solid, then the free surface wouldn't change, and now it's spinning in a cylinder.
You also believe that 10g "would certainly put any liquid against the wall." This is true, but the actual question is howhigh will it push the liquid? You offer your conclusion without explanation. The counter-example is easy to show.
Let's suppose that 10g is enough to be near-vertical. We know the angle of the free surface, relative to vertical, must be arctan(1g / 10g) = 5.7 degrees. Let's say the vortex surface is 2 meters long. In that case, if the top is 20 cm from the rotation axis then the bottom - descending at 5.7 degrees - must be tan(5.7 degrees) = d/(2 meters). Since tan(5.7) = 1/10, then d = 0.2 meters. But there isn't enough room for 200cm of inclination!
Obviously, with 100 g then the displacement across 2m will be about 20cm. This means the 20cm vortex surface must have well over 100 g in order to maintain a near-vertical surface. Yes, this requires more than 1,000 rpm.
I've now worked this out in two different ways, and presented the math. I get basically the same result each way. Those also seem to agree with the engineering analysis you point out.
All you've said is that I'm "misrepresenting" things, that you're "not going to bother looking up where the formula fails", and give seat-of-the-pants answers that are easily shown to be invalid.
Since you had to look up a method to compute the G formula for RPMs - something covered in introductory physics for physics/engineering majors - I therefore conclude that you don't actually understand the engineering physics involved.
So your claim is that when "2 km/s" is referenced on page 3 of the reference, the first which obviously is about the implosion speed after the shock is not related to the second -- which is the necessary speed for the lead.
So you repeat the claim of 2km/s for a vortex in the GF reactor.
A few decimeters irregularity in the bottom of the vortex for the lower plasma injector invalidates that, which you certainly know.
I have no physics background (cs/chemistry), but considering e.g. your insisting on the exact definition of Asimov's prediction above (which I acknowledged in my first comment), I believe you're trolling.
So I'd really like to see other's arguments on this. I'm not going to spend time to get the cobwebs out of the part of my head where old math studies are stored for what likely is a troll. I have lost too much time as it is.
Edit: I don't think you really care, but cavity compression for a 1 m sphere was done 2012. Google for a pdf called "Update on Progress at General Fusion". ("Fusion Power Associates, 2012 Annual Meeting")
General Fusion has gotten tens of millions of dollars from serious investors. The idea that their design would need to accelerate many tons of molten lead to 2 km/s every pulse (i.e. once per second!) is just too ridiculous.
The TED talk was on Youtube (and ted.com is up now). It was for a non-technical audience, the message is that the GF target is to make economical power plants. A commercial venture, as I wrote.
The only real news is that the plasma injectors are probably done now, over the last month.
There is something a bit funny when a science-fiction writer like Asimov can get the future pretty right 50 years ago, when a futurist like Kurzweil can't predict it for ten:
Though in itself, it probably show more that technology is a lot slower moving than you would think, after all, as the article point out, some of the future technologies were already present in some form.
Asimov is not a simple "science-fiction writer," he was a real genius with fantastically broad and clear knowledge. Try to read his non-fiction books, you'd be surprised how good grasp he has whatever subject he takes.
I firmly believe he was right to say:
"Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do."
I wasn't saying anything negative about Asimov, I have a tremendous amount of respect for the man, it was more about the contrast between someone supposed to write fiction and the other supposed to predict the future and how one got thing righter than the other. The irony seemed rich.
Asimov and Kurzweil seem (to me) to be making similar predictions in terms of the gap between their predictions and the status quo. 50 years is probably a lot easier for that kind of progress to be made than 10. Did Asimov make any 10 year predictions? Not knocking either, but it would be interesting to see if Asimov had trouble with a shorter horizon.
I don't consider Kurzweil being able to make an good predictions in any time frame, his ideas are more a wishful thinking than showing the real understanding. I believe his major trait is just extrapolating wrongly, like here:
One gotcha of predicting is thinking of advancements as an invention followed by an almost inevitable progression towards better, cheeper and ubiquitous. Flying cars, household nuclear plants & lunar holidays have been possible with money-is-no-object technology but have stayed there while computers went from on Paper Turing machines to smartphones in your pocket thanks to Moore's law. Engines became ubiquitous in an economic process started by their invention. But, the economic process can independent to the discovery. They multiply each other so one can be worthless without the other. For space fairing, nuclear power, and lots of other things we never got a Moore's Law.
An interesting anecdote from the article is the first video call in 1964. That "invention" of the video call wasn't even an important event on the way to ubiquitous video calling. Modern video calls are a practically an inevitable outcome of a process driven by Moore's law and the internet. The idea of invention followed by iteration leading to ubiquity just doesn't apply here.
I think this is the strength and weakness of Ray Kurzweil (I like Ray Kurzweil warts, misfires and all). You might say that he gets caught by this gotcha. He expects an initial invention followed by improvements and refinements to launch a self propelled economic cycle like engines and computers did. Those things are rare and truly paradigm shifting. Also hard to predict.
OTOH, you might say he's on the right track because he's looking for the paradigm shifts. AI, Immortality. Etc.
I personally read Kurzweil similarly to the way I read Asimov. It's a form of art. I like Kurzweil's ideas aesthetically.
Seems like Asimov's main genius was just looking at what the trends of his time were - long distance communication, television/media, cheaper/nuclear energy, automation (robots are the ultimate automation, right?), and increasing inequality and just forecasted that those trends would get cheaper and more widely accessible.
Futurists like Kurzweil seem to forecast much more drastic changes in human behavior (although the link to predictions made by RK is actually a lot more accurate than I would have guessed. Still out there, but none of them seem "impossible" to me. He seems to mainly just be too aggressive in his "when."
And in his spare time, a PHD in biochem, and a university professor of biochemistry, and author of a couple dozen popular science non-fiction books. Not exactly the kind of guy who merely wrote Jar Jar Bink's movie lines all day, or decided which red shirt gets it on Trek.
Some of those were obviously never going to happen in those timescales though. Automated cars by 2000? As an undergraduate doing a work with image recognition in the early 90s I could have told you that that required component alone wouldn't be up to the required standard in 10 years and probably not 20.
Similarly automatic translation. These are just tough problems that will take time to solve and even in the heady anything-is-possible-90s that was obvious to anyone who had the remotest understanding of what they were dealing with.
> As an undergraduate doing a work with image recognition
The "vision" for automated cars at the time didn't involve image recognition -- it involved sensors in the road and on each car. The technology for this was certainly available by 2000, but the justification for such a massive investment in infrastructure was not.
I recently read about a self-driving car that was built using only machine vision by a neural network, in the 1990s. I was very surprised such a thing existed at all back then.
Asimov didn't really have an agenda. Kurzweil is trying to push the envelope. He has to, the chance that singularity or cryogenics will be available within his lifetime is pretty small.
At the very least he had, as of a few years ago when I met him at a speaking event, very few wrinkles for someone his age. I don't think he's got magical life extension kool aid yet, but it seems like he's doing something that at least reduces the appearance of aging a little bit. Although all the meta-analyses recently reporting the potential negative effects of supplementation are in disagreement with his approach.
It's interesting how social and human issues overrule technology in most cases though. Predicting what technology will be possible seems to be a lot easier than predicting what people will actually want to use.
With regards to "communications will become sight-sound", this has been theoretically possible for nearly all communications for a while now, yet broadly speaking people choose not to be on video despite it being possible. The same goes for 3D TV, as noted in the article, or the renaissance of proper cooking as opposed to chucking semi-artificial muck into the microwave for 5 minutes as was considered 'the future' in the late 70s.
Not only do we not always use video, we seem to prefer even lower fidelity communications.
Many humans are less inhibited when they're typing than when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they're more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it's radically improving millions of people's love lives (or at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there's a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called "phone calls." You dial a number after which everything you say can be heard by the other person, and vice versa. It's that simple. But it's not as popular in some circles as this awkward system where you break your thumbs typing huge strings of numbers just to say "damn you're hot," because that string of numbers gets you a date, and you would never have the guts to say "damn you're hot" using your larynx.
> It's interesting how social and human issues overrule technology in most cases though.
Exactly, the same is painfully true for our presence in space. He could have easily been right about the moon base, we just chose to not "do" space.
The big takeaway from this for me is that it's possible for a tech-minded person to make good predictions about the speed of technological advancement in general, it just gets thwarted by the uncertainty of society's interest in these things.
I think this is why sci-fi authors seem to predict future better than futurists - to write good science fiction you need not only to have imagination and know the science well, but you also need to grok people and society, if you want your book to be believable for audience.
The killer app for video calling, would be one in which you don't have to hold the camera. We'd rather place the phone to our ear. And the current alternative is probably nostril cam. We each need a Lakitu.
I don't want someone to see me unless there is a reason. All of a sudden I have to worry about whether I look like I'm paying attention (I'm probably not), what I look like (I'll take a phone call in my Pjs, I wouldn't take a video call), whether I'm doing something that looks unappealing and so on.
Video offers additional benefits but they come with a "price". For me personally it seems as if that given that price you've got to be in a position where the benefit is worth it.
When reviewing assorted long-term predictions, I've notice the primary issue with failed predictions isn't so much that we can't do X, but that we don't want to.
50-100 years ago, the big favorite was variations of living in space/Moon/Mars/etc. Yes, we could certainly do that. What the pundits failed to take into account was that for all the hard work involved in settling there, it's...boring. Yeah, the trip there is exciting ('cuz it's fast, violent, and failure would be spectacular), and being "the first" (or among such) would be a social thrill, but once there mere survival would be paramount & dominating with little time to explore stagnant rocks.
Likewise other predictions. Yeah, we can do them, but given a matter of diminishing returns on high costs we'd rather stare at pocket supercomputers with instant worldwide high-bandwidth communications.
Although Asimov was actually trying to predict the future here, SF writers generally aren't in the prediction business—they are in the speculation business[1] (many modern SF writers claim the 'S' in SF would be for 'Speculation' rather than 'Science').
I find it unfair when SF writers are held to account for their more fanciful speculations—they should be free to ask "What if?" without later ridicule.
[1] In reality, they are in the entertainment business and should therefore be allowed to entertain without later ridicule, too.
I think it's worth noting that in many ways, the future predicted by these writers are being realized because the kids who grew up loving these books and their premises are building the future that they saw in these texts and dreamed of as a child.
There's a lot of difficulty in evaluating stuff like this, and I feel like we inevitably trip over biases that go in both directions. On one hand, it's very easy in hindsight to ridicule what didn't come true or what seems like an outdated 1960s infatuation. However, it's also easy to pick through his predictions and pick through the modern day and apparently find a match.
Ultimately, I give some credit that he wasn't completely wrong (which I suspect is a lot harder than it seems!), but I don't think these predictions were particularly visionary -- just intelligently made given the information of his own time, which is all we can really expect.
He reasonably charts the technology of his own time to today. Some of it turns out alright, some of it not, and some in between.
>To give him his due, flat-screen televisions have replaced traditional sets, and 3D television technologies, while not in cube form, have long been a highlight of the electronics trade show circuit.
my guess is that he meant 3d television sans the glasses...
So he states that most people would be worse off in 50 years than they were then. This contradicts what Bill Gates said that people are generally better off and extreme poverty is lower now than a generation ago. (Paraphrasing) this article seems to imply that people are worse off and we need equal access in agreement with Asimov, but doesn't outright say this. While I certainly agree we should strive for equal access it seems as though progress has been made in the opposite direction than predicted.
No, that's not at all what he said. He basically said the same thing Bill Gates did, that the poor today are better off than the poor yesterday, but he also said that the gap between the rich and the poor would grow. Which is indisputable and probably his wildest claim, given that up to that point in US history, growing upper-class wealth saw a proportional lower- and middle-class growth as well.
men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better - Hit
By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button - Close
Windows need be no more than an archaic touch, and even when present will be polarized to block out the harsh sunlight. The degree of opacity of the glass may even be made to alter automatically in accordance with the intensity of the light falling upon it. - Miss
if its windows are not polarized, they can nevertheless alter the "scenery" by changes in lighting - Miss
Suburban houses underground, with easily controlled temperature, free from the vicissitudes of weather, with air cleaned and light controlled, should be fairly common - Miss
Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare "automeals," heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. - Hit
reakfasts will be "ordered" the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning. - Miss
Complete lunches and dinners, with the food semiprepared, will be stored in the freezer until ready for processing. - Hit
I suspect, though, that even in 2014 it will still be advisable to have a small corner in the kitchen unit where the more individual meals can be prepared by hand, especially when company is coming. - Hit
Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. - Hit
It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the "brains" of robots. - Hit
In fact, the I.B.M. building at the 2014 World's Fair may have, as one of its prime exhibits, a robot housemaidlarge, clumsy, slow- moving but capable of general picking-up, arranging, cleaning and manipulation of various appliances. - Honda, not IBM but Hit
The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. - Miss
And experimental fusion-power plant or two will already exist in 2014.- Hit
Large solar-power stations will also be in operation in a number of desert and semi-desert areas - Hit
An exhibit at the 2014 fair will show models of power stations in space, collecting sunlight by means of huge parabolic focusing devices and radiating the energy thus collected down to earth. - Miss
There is every likelihood that highways at least in the more advanced sections of the worldwill have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. - Miss
There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the aira foot or two off the ground. - Miss
Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with "Robot-brains"vehicles that can be set for particular destinations and that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver. - Hit
For short-range travel, moving sidewalks (with benches on either side, standing room in the center) will be making their appearance in downtown sections. - Miss
Traffic will continue (on several levels in some places) only because all parking will be off-street and because at least 80 per cent of truck deliveries will be to certain fixed centers at the city's rim. - Miss
Compressed air tubes will carry goods and materials over local stretches, and the switching devices that will place specific shipments in specific destinations will be one of the city's marvels. - Miss
Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. - Hit
The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. - Hit
Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth - Hit
For that matter, you will be able to reach someone at the moon colonies - Miss
As for television, wall screens will have replaced the ordinary set - Hit
but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible. - Miss
In 2014, there is every likelihood that the world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000 - Hit
Boston-to-Washington, the most crowded area of its size on the earth, will have become a single city with a population of over 40,000,000. - Miss
Most surprising and, in some ways, heartening, 2014 will see a good beginning made in the colonization of the continental shelves. - Miss
Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be "farms" turning to the more efficient micro-organisms - Mixed
Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors. The 2014 fair will feature an Algae Bar at which "mock-turkey" and "pseudosteak" will be served. - Hit
It won't be bad at all (if you can dig up those premium prices), but there will be considerable psychological resistance to such an innovation. - Hit
A larger portion than today will be deprived and although they may be better off, materially, than today, they will be further behind when compared with the advanced portions of the world. They will have moved backward, relatively. - Hit
There are only two general ways of preventing this: (1) raise the death rate; (2) lower the birth rate. Undoubtedly, the world of A>D. 2014 will have agreed on the latter method. - Hit
Indeed, the increasing use of mechanical devices to replace failing hearts and kidneys, and repair stiffening arteries and breaking nerves will have cut the death rate still further and have lifted the life expectancy in some parts of the world to age 85. - Hit
There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect. The rate of increase of population will have slackened*but, I suspect, not sufficiently. - Hit
One of the more serious exhibits at the 2014 World's Fair, accordingly, will be a series of lectures, movies and documentary material at the World Population Control Center (adults only; special showings for teen-agers). - Miss
The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. - Hit
All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary "Fortran" (from "formula translation"). - Miss
Even so, mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. - Hit
The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine. - Hit
Indeed, the most somber speculation I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work! - Miss
I admire the work you did to make a point-by-point analysis. I have objections to a few of your decisions.
You count kitchens that can produce automeals, including making bacon, as a "hit"? I counted it as a miss. Where is there such a kitchen?
That is, "heating water and converting it to coffee" can't be considered standalone, since percolators existed when Asimov made the prediction. Auto drip coffee ("Mr. Coffee") is from the 1970s, so I think that's a hit. But toasters existed in 1964, so "toasting bread" can't mean just that. What device can I acquire for "frying, poaching or scrambling eggs"? And for making bacon?
I don't think the increase of life expectancy in Japan, which is the only one with an average life expectancy of 85 or above, is due to "mechanical devices to replace failing hearts and kidneys." That is, he emphasized mechanical devices, and not the general increase of life expectancy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan attributes it instead to "high education, devotion to raising healthy children, late marriage, increased participation of women in the labor force, small living spaces, education about the problems of overpopulation, and the high costs of child care and education."
So I would say that's closer to a miss than a hit.
The reference to the "worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control" is interesting because I think the drive was much bigger in the 1960s/1970s with the Zero Population Growth movement. The 1980s saw the single child policy in place in China, and the 1970s saw the discourteously attempts as "rational" birth control in India. Instead, I think the current trend is towards female education and equal rights for women, which also ends up decreasing the number of children. So it's hard to say if this is a "hit" or "miss", since I don't know what Asimov meant.
You said that "Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth" is a hit. That's a hard one to judge, but it's technically incorrect. GOE systems like Inmarsat don't reach every spot on earth, like the highest 30 or so degrees of latitude, or valleys. It's LEO systems like Iridium that can provide global satellite coverage.
I'm curious about how you can quantify "The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort..." as a hit. How much more is it true than it was in 1964? It seems to me that the richest people in the world (as a proxy for 'true elite') is not made up primarily by those who are best characterized as "involved in creative work."
Obviously any accounting like this is open to debate but, for the most part, I tried to judge by the spirit of the prediction and was generous if the exact mechanism was a little bit off.
* automeals: It's less about the specific items that can be cooked and more about the proliferation of single-purpose kitchen devices and the general trend towards easier cooking. Stuff like microwave bacon cookers, slap chops, pasta cooking containers and other infomercialware
* Life expectancy hasn't quite hit 85 but it's close enough to count. And while education and healthy eating has contributed to it, undoubtably as well, so has pacemakers and dialysis machines.
* Birth control: I agree with you but I still think this is directionally right. We have more birth control today than 50 years ago, even if it isn't the main thrust right now.
* Satellites: The mechanism may be wrong but we can, indeed, direct dial any place on earth right now.
* Lucky few: I interpreted this to mean the elimination of "good blue collar jobs" and the bifurcation of society into the educated few with "good" jobs and the underclass working commodity service jobs.
The difficulty in judging any prediction is to the extent that it was true at the time it was made. For example, someone in the 1990s who predicts that there would be self-driving vehicles by 2015 would be correct, because there were self-driving vehicles already in the 1980s.
It's very hard for me to judge the 1960s, but that was the era of the TV-dinners and Swanson frozen food delivery trucks. Certainly my grandmother had single-purpose kitchen devices, like a pressure cooker, sausage maker, and gelatin molds that I haven't seen in most modern kitchens, along with a mechanical knife grinder/can opener and grapefruit spoons, which I only rarely see these days. Also, my parents received two fondue sets for their wedding - apparently fondue dinners were the in-thing then. My rough sense is that there's no increasing trend towards gadgets, but only a change in the details.
Which is why I conclude that Asimov meant something more than a bunch of kitchen gadgets and a more diverse selection of TV dinners.
FWIW, I do think that the life expectancy in Japan definitely counts. I just don't think that pacemakers and dialysis machines contribute enough to be notable.
What's amazing about satellite phones is actually how wrong the prediction was, despite being 100% correct. While it's completely correct that sat phones can reach everywhere on earth, the economics behind Iridium failed because it turns out to be easier to set up cell phone towers and lay down transoceanic fiber connections. People generally don't want to direct dial "any place on earth" but rather "any place on the earth where other people live". It's also possible to provide cell service underground, like subway stations, where satellites can't reach.
I think your "lucky few" interpretation is valid. Really I'm complaining more about the vagueness of the prediction. It could equally well have been made 100 years previous.
It doesn't mention "The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes"
Nor does it mention "Jets of compressed air will also lift land vehicles off the highways, which, among other things, will minimize paving problems".
Nor "2014 will see a good beginning made in the colonization of the continental shelves."
Or, when it talks about automatic coffee makers, it omits the full context "... next heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on." So in this sense Asimov correctly predicted the electric drip coffee maker of the 1970s, but the others are failures.
It's also a stretch to classify ITER as an "experimental fusion-power plant". ITER is a fusion reactor, yes, but it's not a power plant. ITER sets the groundwork for such a plant, currently called DEMO, but with only a vague idea that it might start operations in 2033.