Comment by exhaze | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exhaze | Hacker News Reader

Saw Lain growing up. Quite fond of it. Pretty weak at predicting the future. You know who was pretty good at it? Isaac Asimov (spoilers ahead). My favorite example:

Protagonist visits a highly advanced planet where everyone lives on their own plot of land. People lead lives of leisure, all of their needs are taken care of by highly efficient robots. However, they are terrified of physical contact, especially with the protagonist, due to a risk of infection with off-planet viruses. Here’s where it gets kinda scary:

- all interactions are done via advanced telepresence. It’s been perfectly replicated to mimic physical interaction. People only meet in person, apprehensively, for reproductive purposes

- one of the main supporting characters is an extreme extrovert who subliminally craves physical human contact. Due to society’s rules, the only thing she’s able to do is take lots of socially distanced telepresence walks with a friend.

This book was written in 1957.

This has a lot less to do with the modern world than Lain does. Yes, even with COVID. Do you mean it's predicting some future state of the world that you expect to come to be?

The "meeting in person is odd, interactions are typically machine-mediated and remote" thing was also done (most famously) by EM Forster (1909; collected 1928), and also by Clarke's The City and the Stars (1956 publication; based on a 1948 novella, though I don't know whether that element was present in it as I've only read the novel). Probably a bunch of others, too. I'd rank the oracular qualities of Asimov's sci-fi fairly low, so far as that matters (shrug), especially for any original and not already-tropey-by-the-time-he-did-it ideas of his.

Asimov's use of the trope in that story had more to do with creating a setting as much the opposite of the packed-like-sardines city-world of the first Robot Detective book than trying to predict anything, or to present the mostly-remote-interaction society thing as a novel notion per se. The defining characteristics of the society on that planet were extreme wealth, individualism, and personal-security paranoia. Their interaction habits fell out of those traits and preferences.

If you want to go even further back, I recently discovered "The Machine Stops" from 1909, which covers a fair bit of that: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/th...

I think about this all the time. When I read it way back when I thought it sounded like an absurd extrapolation of the future. And yet here we are.

The exceptional circumstances of a global pandemic aren't "predicting the future".

This point would be more relevant if it had accidentally become the norm, but that straight up hasn't and won't happen (hence the ongoing pandemic, to some extent).

What’s the title of the book?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Sun

Third (edit: second) "Robot" novel (human detective pairs up with a robot partner and solves crime mysteries). The world's written that way to provide a polar-opposite setting from earlier settings for that series (an incredibly tightly-packed and bustling city). In both cases, the natives of the worlds have adapted to their situation to the point of pathology—people from Earth (the city-world) tend toward agoraphobia, for instance. The whole setting is part of a sci-fi trend of settings that suppose Earth will become crushingly overcrowded with humans, leaving space as the only escape from that.

EDIT: other poster is correct—I got the book wrong the first time (I had it as The Robots of Dawn, from the same series)

It's The Naked Sun. The people aren't averse to in-person contact due to disease (though that is their concern with people from Earth specifically). Nearly every one of the colony worlds (including the one in that book) have, in the books, essentially eradicated disease due to their opportunity to properly quarantine and treat it (versus the massive population still on Earth, you can't as easily wipe out a disease when you still have millions and billions of people living in megacities in close contact with each other). The particular world has a low population and people are spread out, so it's become the social custom to practice physical distancing to an extreme degree (think about the difference between personal space in different countries, then exaggerate it to an extreme).

Is this a sci-fi novel, or just a non-fiction account of Scandinavians in Wisconsin?

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