1. We have at least one fusion plant I know of, the UK Joint Torus, which I know have been operating for decades. It just consumes more power than it generates. But Asimov suggests one or two, which is strikingly accurate.

2. We could probably make radio-decay batteries (maybe not AA size, but car batteries running on Thorium or some such, albeit an extremely expensive containment for something running so hot). We probably just don't do it because the radiation risks are too high.

And I'd count airport conveyors as moving sidewalks. Or just the complexity of baggage carrying systemes in those airports, lend that we easily have the technoloy to create weather resistant rotary motor systems as sidewalks, but like Asimovs suggestions of underground housing, cost is the bigger prohibitor than technology.

Also, I don't think the degree of boredom he touches on has occured. Consumerism and the wealth concentration in the US has kept people needing to maintain 40 hour work weeks where productivity is magnitudes higher. We produce vastly more, but work as much as ever. Back in the 60s the sentiment was that 21st century Americans might have 10 hour work weeks.

It operated ("actually sustained fusion") for a total of four seconds, in 1997. Most of the work involves non-fusion plasmas.

http://www.jet.efda.org/wp-content/uploads/jeteuropeansucess...

That was a costly experiment: the resulting radiation -- neutron activation of the structure -- made the reactor inaccessible for 18 months.

http://www.iop.org/Jet/fulltext/JETP98037.pdf

Isn't that because we now have a very large semi-parasitical managerial class that we need to support? It's almost a retreat into feudalism. Doubt anybody saw that coming.

Think of pointless meetings, smoke breaks, soda breaks, talking about sports, life, hobbies, debating/complaining, talking politics, talking about TV shows, online shopping, keeping up with twitter/FB/Linkedin, Hacker News, the average cubie dweller probably only puts in 10-20 hours a week of actual work right now.

"Everyone knows" the guy who's forced to put in 60 hours at the office who spends 50 of those hours on FB / Reddit / talking about football, etc.

There's a Russian proverb about we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.

If you define work as "hours spend on premises" then no one has worked as many hours as Americans do today since the early 1900s. If you define work as actually doing something productive, well, thats a whole nother ball game.

For actual work, maybe even less.

But not having pocession of your body for 8-12 hours every day in exchage for a pay-check, is work too. Even if you just sit there and "do nothing".

People work to support themselves, but I would wager that most would work less to support themselves if they could earn enough to do so.

Is that what you meant?

I suppose he'll next tell us that the rich are "job creators."

Job providers, I get why those are important. Not everyone wants to be bothered with the business side of living, along with its risks. I can actually see how that division of labour and responsibilities aids both sides of the equation.

But if you count self-employment, there's job providers on every rung of the social ladder. The chinese guy selling chua'r on the street is a job provider, just as much as the multimillion entrepreneur employing thousands of people. So it becomes senseless to say that one wealth bracket supplies jobs, and another one doesn't.

And then there's "job creation", which seems like a meaningless metric if you don't factor in loss of jobs, current amount of jobs, unemployment, etc. And you seriously want to pin that metric down on a single group?

By the way, if the take the logic further, and look at who's implicated in major job destruction (layoffs), it's us. Hackers. I'm going from the Systems optimization definition here, and when you optimize away a part of a system, someone's bound to get fired. Your packaging machine eliminated 5 packaging workers. Your fiber optic cable eliminated 50 post office workers.

They're being added, somewhere.

The truth behind job scarcity or not is supply and demand. Period. If there is no demand for yours, or someone elses labor, there is no job. No wealth redistribution will change that. The arguments behind why, though, the concentration of wealth was bad, is that the wealthy have fewer demands they want met relative to the entirety of everyone else. A more prosperous majority gnerates tremendous demand, millionaires generate limited and specific demand.

But you don't escape the reality of having a supply of something trying to meet the demand for it. There just isn't much demand for a lot of labor types, and producitivity multipliers in technology lets that demand be met with much less workforce supply, which means tremendous economic efficiency gains.

Me too. Apparently it's primarily a mass-media political posturing tool for the (fearing-to-be-)disenfranchised classes (ie. a huge proportion of the population).

producitivity multipliers in technology lets that demand be met with much less workforce supply, which means tremendous economic efficiency gains.

... and loads of people shifted to the bottom of the opportunity barrel, save for states with some semblance of social welfare (ie. not the US).

With regards to your comment on 1% of people being farmers and that being adequate, here's some fast facts about the US agricultural industry:

(1) 300 million people in the US, and the US can sustainably produce food for only 130 million of them. (recentish UN estimate I believe)

(2) Many US farms are net energy consumers, ie. they burn more energy in production than they give people in food.

Second, the earth will actually produce enough to support many humans using no humans (ie. "let the plants grow back, stop maintaining the concrete, stop unsustainably exploiting and poisoning the environment"). It just requires us to be a bit more in tune with the environment (eg. decentralize, consume in-season, eat less meat, start sharing a bit more).

Interesting times.

The Apollo program, as impressive as it was, was never expected to be extendable to a colony effort. Rather first a space station was to be put in orbit, then on-orbit refueling, then space 'tugs', and then you could send up things that could land on the moon and ship additional building materials there.

That said, I found the hovercraft idea interesting since the benefit of hovercraft are completely negated by the inability to push against the surface for turning force and thus to re-capture forward energy into turning energy. This is a huge problem with lighter than air airships as well. Asimov should have known that.

The IIS gets regular resupplies to keep its environmental support systems operational and habitable.

Cost per kg from Earth to Lunar surface argue otherwise.

A multi-national consortium can barely manage to sustain operations of a 6 man crew in low-Earth orbit.

2. I bet we could figure it out. Again don't see any reason why it is not possible. Very little research has gone into that particular problem which I think is the main reason it has not been done.

Hardly irritating - that's my job, which I enjoy.

Sure, moon colonies would require enormous effort, staggering cost, and some new technology. The problem isn't the engineering challenge; we put people & equipment in a habitable box, and brought them back, using half-century-old technology. The problem is the cost far exceeds the payoff for anywhere close to the foreseeable future, and the scenery there is about as interesting as Death Valley (briefly compelling, but you wouldn't want to live there).

> where productivity is magnitudes higher

Overall, yes. Per worker? Hell no. Half or more of current jobs are pushing paper and doing meaningless bureaucratic work. Related article from last week: www.strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

> Overall, yes. Per worker? Hell no. Half or more of current jobs are pushing paper and doing meaningless bureaucratic work.

Actually, productivity per worker has grown for most developed countries. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a wealth of information on the subject: http://www.bls.gov/fls/intl_gdp_capita_gdp_hour.htm

Of note is chart 6, which shows GDP per hour worked has grown, albeit slowly, for most developed countries; and table 2a, which shows real GDP per employed person has more than doubled since 1960 for the US, and in some developed countries like Japan, increased 6-7x.

1. http://www.uspowerboating.com/Assets/TrainingDept/Powerboat+...

2. Do the betavoltaics [2] in some early pacemakers and the small reactor on spacecraft and the Mars Science Laboratory count as radioactive batteries? But I am assuming that, since betavoltaic pacemakers and nuclear spacecraft have been around since Asimov's time, they probably don't count.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaics

[1] https://lasers.llnl.gov/newsroom/project_status/index.php

They can be miniaturised, using the photoelectric effect, alphavoltaics or betavoltaics.

We do not use them because "Nuclear is bad, m'kay?", and the market just isn't there, so the R&D hasn't happened.

The irony is nice but misplaced. We already have a huge problem disposing the toxic waste of regular batteries.

Not to mention what other misuses those could have if accessed by the random lunatic....

Adjustable transmissivity glass is a reality but not yet practical enough for it to be ubiquitous.

Radioactive batteries very much do exist, they are called RTGs, and they have given great benefit to spacecraft and other equipment. They power the Curiosity rover, for example. However, they are too impractical and too expensive to be used for ordinary household equipment. This would be true even without the radiation problems of RTGs, which are, of course, significant.

We should have moon colonies by now and ironically the Apollo program is probably the most at fault for that. In order to make it happen a lot of political capital was expended, creating a particular political situation which has become a permanent institution within NASA manned spaceflight (specifically, billions of federal dollars flowing into a few very specific congressional districts which has continued through Apollo and Shuttle programs and now SLS/Orion). If NASA had instead concentrated on a slower program which built up long-lived infrastructure and optimized toward lowering launch costs and increasing capabilities then we would easily have cities (or at least towns) in orbit and moonbases, and Mars bases.

Asimov says windows "will be polarized to block out the harsh sunlight." That sure sounds to me like putting LCD tech in a window, sans backlight and Bayer filter. We don't use the tech architecturally, but we certainly mass-produce it at the sizes needed for use as window panes. And passive photochromic lenses are also commodity items. Either one is completely practical for integration into a window, there just isn't currently demand to do so.

I disagree! Azimov didn't say that we will be using fusion power, he said that an "experimental fusion-power plant or two will already exist".

Which is pretty much what ITER[1] is.

So to me, this is one of the most accurate predictions.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

For a 50 year prediction this is very accurate. (As apposed to the glowing walls.)

I used to have corrective glasses that did what he described. I can't remember what the type of lens was called, and Google is being unhelpful. But walking in and out of shade was definitely a bit annoying because it kept repolarizing.

> ✗ Moving sidewalks (do airport conveyors count?)

I'd say so. Open question: how would we put benches on moving sidewalks?

P.S. I am amused you didn't include hovercars.

[0] - http://web.archive.org/web/20090809091201/http://www.newscie...

(using wayback machine because new site is behind paywal)

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

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

There's DragonBox, which teaches basic algebra [0]. There's 3D software (Blender etc. or just 3D stuff in a web browser), which, because of its interactivity, makes it much easier to understand complicated 3D shapes (and can help with visualisation when doing group-theoretic calculations).

And then there's all the stuff that we take for granted, e.g. highly optimised search algorithms for teaching material and papers, instant unit conversions and even fairly complicated calculations using Google and Wolfram Alpha, and so on.

Also, Wikipedia.

"Part of the General Electric exhibit today consists of a school of the future in which such present realities as closed-circuit TV and programmed tapes aid the teaching process.."

Compared to some of the items above, it looks like technology has gone well into and even a little beyond merely 'aiding' the teaching process.

[0]: http://www.dragonboxapp.com

(Very good summary BTW - thanks.) =]

x Smart glass Yes, but again a cost question. There's this [http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2012/01/10/t-ts-samsun...], by Samsung. I don't see why you couldn't replace your windows with such screens if you had the spare dough. Also, there's privacy glass, which is cheaper, but still sets you back 500USD/m².

x Fusion power plants. Those might be a couple of years off.

x Radioactive batteries. Exist, but not in the scale and power density Asimov predicts. There are nuclear batteries for pacemakers [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacel].

x Moving sidewalks Yep, only at chokepoints and long stretches of unidirectional people movement indoors.

x Moon colonies. They're on the other side, hiding. Trust me on this one.

A lot of these points are arguable. I'm easily excitable, so I consider technological feasibility/existence as a check, but your view on it may be more somber (It has to be exactly as he predicted). I'm just amazed he got that much of it right.

On a side note, why couldn't the non-asimov prediction with blimp filled skies come true? They're like sky whales...and I really should get some sleep.

Ammonia, Hydrogen flouride, and Diborane are either reactive or toxic.

Helium, Hydrogen and hot air are the most popular options, but none of them are as safe or cheap as plain old planes.

Moving sidewalks: I don't think the airport walkways count. Conveyor belts and escalators were both around long before 1964. The prediction is about where they'd be used.

Smart glass is done and has been for a long time. See Transitions Lenses or Speedglas welding masks. I realize it's cost-prohibitive to scale, but there's also SAGE windows, which use liquid crystal to block light.

I'm not sure what qualifies as an EL panel, but LED panels have gotten crazy bright and cheap and are being used more and more.

I count the conveyors in airports as 'moving sidewalks'. :)

I agree Moon colonization was a fail, but to be fair we could colonize the moon, but why would we want to?

> exist in 2014

They do.