Isaac Asimov on The David Letterman Show (1980) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Isaac Asimov on The David Letterman Show (1980) [video]

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127 pointsehudla36 comments

I think the major thing Asimov misses in some of his writing is are the 2nd and 3rd order effects of technology. Not always - Solaria from The Naked Sun comes to mind as a society heavily distorted by their tech - but often. And this led him to not anticipate tech such as the Internet.

For example, early on he mentioned having predicted pocket-sized computers in the early 1950s - which is true (I don't remember whether it was an Empire, Foundation or Robots story). But the other stuff, and society around the pocket-sized computers remained unchanged. Pocket-sized computing didn't apparently make an impression on people other than scientists and engineers. The freer availability of information didn't change society's behavior in any way.

It's something that you often see in sci-fi - the authors don't foresee all the follow-on effects or possibilities of the things they introduce. I loved Star Wars as a kid, but now I can't help but wonder why they didn't have a Galactic Internet to transmit the stolen Death Star plans in Episode 4.

Star Wars is full of strange anachronisms like using manually targeted heavy weapons (so that they cannot hit a moving target).

Even WW2 ack-ack used radar to double their effectiveness. (The US did, the Japanese and German radar did not, which left them with a disastrous disadvantage.)

FYI: Ships have always had accurate azimuth targeting, but not range (distance.) Stationary radar (ships, submarines, planes) in WW2 greatly helped the USA and Britain, but there's some twists most people don't know about.

The ship-borne radar range of about 70 miles usually did not give enough time to scramble fighters to altitude to be effective in the Midway-era, for example.

US submarines were actually able to sink Japanese ships using radar exclusively, without ever visually seeing the target.

The USA had "VT code-word" shells with radar proximity fuses that were 5x more effective than other shells. They were used as a last resort to keep them Top Secret. So they were used in tough battles like Sicily and Okinawa, and over ocean (the Marianas turkey shoot and the kamikaze era.)

In fairness what you're asking is virtually impossible to predict with any degree of precision since you have all sorts of unpredictable variables like the culture of what is deemed "cool" and the issue that the tech that wins the market is often not the best tech but rather the one backed by the most ruthlessness businesses instead.

Plus it was an order of magnitude harder to predict what technology would be like back in the pre-Micro PC era because digital technology was still a very young concept so there was less experience to draw upon when making such predictions

He did have a short story where pocked-sized computers did greatly change society. See "The Feeling of Power" [1].

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

> I loved Star Wars as a kid, but now I can't help but wonder why they didn't have a Galactic Internet to transmit the stolen Death Star plans in Episode 4.

Bandwidth issues. Same reason Amazon offers the Snowball service (physical transfer of petabyte-scale data) rather than just keep everything as a Glacier egress.

Haha! How about a hyperspace-capable drone then? Or literally thousands or millions (ya I get the Rebellion is skint but drones can't cost that much) of them, one to every single star system, and then broadcast the plans to every Galactic citizen? It would make for devastating propaganda.

I was watching that while my wife overheard and commented on how funny he was.

Meanwhile UK TV prime time talk shows only have reality TV people, and film people (both times I avoided the word 'star' deliberately). Most of them are dull-as-a-door-mat, and so the show relies on the host saying outrageous things to them. There must be some people left in the world who are both funny and smart.

David Letterman was just good.

The majority of US talk shows work exactly as you describe.

Carson was even better than Letterman (by Letterman's admission as well). That style of late show - and I suspect the soil it requires to thrive - seems to have entirely disappeared from the culture.

everyone has to see the Nathan For You episode "The Anecdote", where he constructs a perfect "talk show anecdote" for his appearance on Jimmy Kimmel, and then retroactively orchestrates the bizarre events of his anecdote in real life so that they "actually" happened to him. the supercut of several nearly identical, and obviously fake, stories told by "real" celebrities on late night talk shows is amazing.

https://www.avclub.com/nathan-stages-the-perfect-talk-show-a...

see also: his later appearance on Seth Myers where he explains the deal and then re-tells the anecdote. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L7GsGc5adk

Asimov was a well-regarded, in-demand public speaker. It's been a long time since I read his autobiography but I think talks and lectures were one of his major sources of income after writing. It's not surprising that he seems good at being interesting in-person, on-camera.

He wasn‘t able live off of 221 books, or did I miss something?

He actually ended up with close to 400 by the time he died :-)

If someone offers you a nice fat check to talk about science and make jokes for an hour, would you turn it down? No matter how many books you'd already written?

Also, it’s clear from his biographies that he genuinely enjoyed speaking.

I wondered more about whether he Had To(with that many books under his belt) or whether he just did it for enjoyment. Turning it down? Depends on whether the audience and the participants are any good.

Sorry, I thought it was obvious that for a guy like Asimov, talking science and telling jokes were both enjoyable activities :-) . Yes liked doing it - it wasn't forced on him by economic hardship.

> Depends on whether the audience and the participants are any good.

Presumably anyone that books a talk by a renowned science, mystery, and sci-fi writer knows exactly what they're getting - and wants exactly that. It's not like getting a pop star to make an appearance at your event.

> it wasn't forced on him by economic hardship.

What I wondered about! Thanks

> Presumably anyone that books a talk by a renowned science, mystery, and sci-fi writer

With the talkshows lately I'm not so sure, some might just want to look a little more authoritative/persuasive. Nonetheless good point.

"I imagine that in 30 years, we'll have a situation in which there won't be any wars... either that, or there won't be any us." [11:38]

Edit: I should not try to incorporate basic math in dumb jokes about Mules called Osama when I first wake up in the morning, apparently. I am old enough to know better, I have no idea what happened there.

In all seriousness, there were at least a dozen other notable armed conflicts happening around 2010, so I think 30 years was simply a little too short of a timespan for world peace (although the average person's risk of dying violently did drop quite significantly during that time). He was likely thinking more about larger events-- particularly of course the use of nuclear weapons, which he strongly campaigned against. So far, so good there, but it's still way too early to draw conclusions.

A lot of solid foresight in general, though. The main thing that stands out to me is just how it's all taking a lot longer to play out than people were thinking it would in the early 80s.

The 11 in 9/11 is the day. September, 11 2001. I guess, in retrospect, we should have included the year in that.

Well, I screwed that all up. Thanks for the correction, I have edited my comment.

the mormons got it right with "Nine Eleven, Eighteen Fifty Seven". I'll never forget the year of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

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

I like his proposals for space development. Build up in orbit. Space stations, factories, power stations. Build bases and mines on the moon. Then go outwards.

He talks about his-mind version of YouTube in the end.

Isn't it more similar to Twitch?

My favorite part is Isaac's answer to David's observation that the technology is getting more and more complex to use:

https://youtu.be/365kJOsFd3w?t=5m58s

The piano outro played in the last few seconds was the Close Encounters of the Third Kind note sequence[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4PYI6TzqYk

Youtube suggested also this interview of Asimov to me, and I really like it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSxMZBp-2Zs

Fascinating when they start discussing the digital.

How did he miss the internet in 1980, damn Daniel.

Well he talked about using lasers on fiber optic cables to move massive amounts of messages such that everyone could have their own TV channel.

Sounds like he was describing a worldwide fiber optic network that carries YouTube. He just dumbed it down for Dave. :)

He got the gene editing part right. The CRISPR/CAS9 are proving that

I was most surprised by his take on the future of weapons research.

Strange as this may sound, this reminds me of Joe Rogan's interview with Elon Musk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycPr5-27vSI

Some of Asimov's predictions about the future were... off. The middle segment of Musk's interview with Rogan was about the future of AI and cybernetics. It will be very interesting to watch that interview in 40 years.

> Some of Asimov's predictions about the future were... off.

I'd appreciate if you'd be more specific than that. I consider Asimov's predictions and insights reasonably good.

I don't have almost any interest in Musk, however, based on what I've read up to now.

Musk is considered a visionary because he does. As opposed to most other visionaries who speculate.

Sure, Musk speculates as well, but when he gives a time frame multiple it by 1.88.

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