I am rereading Dr. Asimov’s “The Complete Stories”- a collection of Asimov’s short stories. One story quite surprised me: “All the Troubles of the World” written in 1958. The story revolves around the largest industry in the world: Multivac, the giant computer that directed Earth’s economy and all of science. It predicts all crime and disease, it knows everything in the world and with it everything works so well. A version of pre-crime if you will. Every morning the day’s crimes to be are listed out and the police visit the wanna-be criminals and warn them against doing the crime. Of course crime is almost unheard of. No one is arrested, no money is spent on prisons or lost to crime, everyone believes the system works and so of course it does. The concept rests on everyone in the world telling Muitvac everything. No privacy from the machine. You can’t lie or hide anything because the machine will detect it. So no one does and of course it works.
Until one day a yound person innocently asks how to correct a mistake made by Multivac-and Multivac tells him. Destroy Multivac to fix it. And of course it works.
Sounds remarkably like the Internet and Google. No privacy any more. The Internet knows everything.
Isaac Asimov sure knew how to call em. Though of course he didn’t get chaos theory.
Or for an early, very accurate prediction of the Internet, see Murray Leinster’s “A Logic Named Joe” (available legally here - Chapter 2) from 1946
“You know the logics setup. You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision receiver used to, only it’s got keys instead of dials and you punch the keys for what you wanna get. It’s hooked in to the tank, which has the Carson Circuit all fixed up with relays. Say you punch “Station SNAFU” on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an’ whatever vision-program SNAFU is telecastin’ comes on your logic’s screen. Or you punch “Sally Hancock’s Phone” an’ the screen blinks an’ sputters an’ you’re hooked up with the logic in her house an’ if somebody answers you got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today’s race at Hialeah or who was mistress of the White House durin’ Garfield’s administration or what is PDQ and R sellin’ for today, that comes on the screen too. … Very convenient. Also it does math for you, an’ keeps books, an’ acts as consultin’ chemist, physicist, astronomer, an’ tea-leaf reader, with a “Advice to the Lovelorn” thrown in.”
Well Niven and Pournelle predicted the iPhone in “The Mote in God’s Eye”. The only miss is that they used a stylus with it. I actually use a stylus with my tablet. It is more precise than my finger and doesn’t leave finger marks.
I’d also like to give marks to the Vernor Vinge story “True Names”. The parts where hackers try to protect their actual identities and other hackers try to penetrate to their true names is right on.
I was rereading the Heinlein story, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” last year and I noticed how well the part well read where Mike created the virtual image of Adam Selene.
But I’m impressed by Leinster’s “A Logic Called Joe”, cited above. In the story one unit malfunctions, causing the Censorship Circuits to fail. And with no censorship, you get people looking up how to make explosive, murder their wives, digging up plans for banks (so they can be robbed), and kids downloading porn. THAT’s prediction.
FYI Asimov stated somewhere that his story was inspired by a quote which is from The Satyricon of Petronius. In fact, the last sentences of the two are almost identical. T.S. Eliot used the quote as an epigraph to The Waste Land.
What really gets me is that, despite these tentative predictions, nobody really foresaw this in a big way. Most of the above cited things postulated this as a direct resource, a sort of constantly-updated encuclopedia, but failed to really appreciate the interactivity of it. It differed from Wikipedia in that it did have a central governing board. Leinster’s Logics had censors. But by and large these imagined internets weren’t used for communication and self-publishing. No blogging. No personal websites.
It wasn’t until surprisingly late that anything resembling our internet showed up in SF. Arthur C. Clarke included something like it in one of his stories – but that was after DARPANET was a reality. Neal Stephenson has his post-Internet Metaverse in Snow Crash. The first SF novel I recal reading that had something that really looked and felt like our internet was the post-internet Homeward Bound by Harry Turtledove, which came out in 2004.
John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider from 1974 had a lot of things you find on the Internet, including coining the term “computer worm,” having people use fake identities on the net, and information overload.
Not websites, perhaps, but The Machine certainly is used for communication in the 1909 Forster; people never leave their basement rooms! They use something like video chat. It is not just one to one communication either, people entertain and educate each other, and give talks to large groups (and presumably interact as groups too) all via The Machine (which is, basically, described as being a series of tubes!). The story is thoroughly dystopian, but is certainly not about information being doled out by a central authority. (There is a “Central Committee,” but they just publish the user manual.)
The amazing thing is that this was written way before computers (unless you count Babbage and his cogwheels) or even television were even a gleam in anyone’s eye. The most advanced relevant communication technologies that Forster could actually have been familiar with would have been the telephone and the silent movie.
Here is The Machine Stops on line; but, of course, if you were actually using The Machine rather than the Internet, you would not be using anything so low-tech as hypertext, you would be getting the audio version, or the video adaptation.
And nobody had a PC in their home. They might have had a terminal for the net, but Asimov anticipated neighborhood “i-net cafes” (not called that, of course). The closest he came was Arkady’s dedicated word processor (not called that either) in one of the Foundation stories and it was so primitive that a new board (or something) had to be added at significant cost in order to get a different font. General home computers were just never anticipated. As late as maybe 1980, Ken Olsen, the founder of DEC said he couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to have a computer in his home. DEC, an early–and successful–mini-computer pioneer was out of business within ten years of that statement.
there was a radio adaptation of ‘A Logic Named Joe’ that was done on the science fiction show X Minus One in 1956. it has been a while since i listened to it. i remember it to be done well, i don’t know how it compares to the written story from 10 years earlier.
The big difference, of course, between Multivac and the Internet is the de-centralization of computer networks that Asimov didn’t foresee. At the risk of spoiling stories you might not have read, he always depicted Multivac as one large central computer that got bigger and bigger as it evolved, before moving off into hyperspace.
