Asimov and the Disease of Boredom (1964)
archive.nytimes.com
archive.nytimes.com
> Even so, mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. 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.
> 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!
I think this could have already happened, except the definition of "work" is so nebulous, and there is so much wiggle room between the things that actually need to be done and the things we might as well do. Or maybe it has happened in parts of the world, but we are all in denial about it.
When I was younger I may have been amused by the technological speculation — perhaps giving him a score (sorry, no hovercraft for everyday cars, and my Makita is in fact not powered by radioisotopes, but we'll grant you the experimental fusion power plants). We've seen that there are just so many unforeseeables that it is little more than just guessing ... multiplied by how keyed in you are on the what the current state of research is.
To have predicted Maps on the phone you would have had to predict the ubiquity of GPS or some other means of location, predicted small portable displays in order to show a map, predicted a global data network, miniaturization of electronics, the computer revolution.... It's no wonder even William Gibson missed it writing two decades after Asimov.
Was there some odd sort of car with a "moving map" depicted in the 1960's? Or was I victim to some sort of viral image fakery? What did Bond have in Goldfinger — some kind of printed, scrolling map with a moving light (cursor) behind it? Or am I misremembering. Hilarious though to try to do something with 60's tech — perhaps using dead reckoning rather than GPS to guess the car's location (steering plus speed).
Finding meaning becomes the core human task.
Our best tool might be the oldest one: basic ethics. Plato, Aristotle, the $5 paperbacks gathering dust.
https://hackaday.com/2018/06/17/retrotechtacular-car-navigat...
The UK trialed a cassette version here https://youtu.be/4qqnHtH1RAs?si=Y9dKvKtwPVXheLWU
Past discussions: (56 points, 2019, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20072073
(272 points, 2013, 172 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6287340
This was all printed in the front of my copy of Foundation and Earth. Titled as “The Story Behind the Foundation”.
I plan on reading the Robot series next.
I personally felt like the worst part was the dialog between Golan and Bliss/Gaia; they just droned on in debate about isolates bs galaxia. I think I could have overlooked that if there was something to do with the Foundation at all in the book.