Doug.
Here we have the Lemu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.
Fascinating.
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
Uh, Lemu, is that guy with the binoculars watching us?
Cut the camera.
They see us.
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Which of Asimov's predictions have come true?
Thanks for asking!
Speculative science fiction really is a genre of its own.
Some people love it, others find it pointless.
But you can't deny the mental gymnastics involved in imagining the future of our societies, especially when some of those predictions turn out to be right.
In that field, there are a few writers who stand out above the rest.
George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and perhaps most famously, Isaac Asimov.
He was an American author who was born in 1920 and passed away in 1992.
He was best known for landmark science fiction works like Foundation, iRobot and The Last Question.
He wasn't just a writer though.
He was also a professor of biochemistry at Boston University.
During his lifetime, Asimov became well known for his predictions about the future.
In 1964, he published an article in the New York Times imagining what the 2014 World's Fair might look like.
Almost two decades later in 1983, the Toronto Star asked him to picture the world in 2019.
Did he predict a future full of robots then?
Well, not exactly.
He actually avoided a lot of the obvious cliches.
In his New York Times article he wrote robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.
He imagined that at the 2014 World's Fair, one of the biggest attractions from leading tech companies might be a robotic cleaning lady.
That's not a million miles off from where we are today.
Robots aren't widespread in most homes yet, but some companies are developing humanoid models designed to help with household chores.
They're even displayed at tech expos, with Tesla's Optimus and One X's Neo Gamma being good examples.
Okay, so he kind of got the robots right.
What else?
He also wrote that communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone.
For us, having lived through the Covid years, that sounds completely ordinary.
But remember, Asimov wrote this back in 1964.
That was a time at which phones were wired and companies were only just starting to release so-called compact computers, such as the PDP-8, which weighed a hefty 26 kilograms.
More broadly, Asimov foresaw the rise of everyday computing.
In his Toronto Star interview, he predicted that mobile computerized devices would enter our homes and that society would become so complex that we wouldn't be able to function without them.
It's a strikingly poetic way of describing our smartphones really, isn't it?
Asimov predicted that by 2014 we would have landed probes on Mars, but not yet humans.
That's pretty close to the mark.
However, when it came to space exploration, he was somewhat optimistic.
For example, he believed that by the 2010s we'd already have permanent colonies on the Moon.
Exactly.
Asimov got plenty wrong.
He thought education would have been completely transformed by now and focused heavily on computing.
He imagined kitchens filled with machines doing almost everything for us, and he believed that electricity would be cheap and plentiful, thanks to our discovery of nuclear fusion.
Needless to say, reality has played out a little differently.
There you have it.
Now you know which of Asimov's predictions have come true.
In under three minutes, we answer your questions and help you understand the true meaning behind the trends, concepts and acronyms that are making headlines.
Listen along and you will really know for sure.
