News culture This legendary science fiction author predicted YouTube 25 years before it went online: he even wrote the first laws of robotics
Certainly he was the greatest science fiction writer the world has ever seen. He managed to predict many things, including our favorite viewing platform.
It often happens that works predict certain events without us understanding how. In recent years we have been confronted with dozens of predictions Simpson especially with the arrival of the coronavirus or the election of Donald Trump as American President, among others. But this ability to predict the future is nothing new, and in 1980 a world-renowned science fiction author announced the launch of YouTube, more than 20 years before its release. This is the famous Isaac Asimov.
A fortune telling interview
At the microphone of David Letterman On October 21, 1980, Isaac Asimov describes his entire career, talks about the works that shaped him and gives his point of view on the future. And it is this last aspect that interests us here. When Letterman asks him if he sees advances in communications in the coming decades, Asimov replies:
I imagine that we will use laser beams instead of electrical currents or radio waves to communicate. So that everyone can have their own TV channel, just like we all have our own phone numbers now. And video surveillance will become THE thing.
With this last sentence he unintentionally refers to the system of YouTube and other renowned streaming platforms. Note that he mentions this principle at a time when televisions are gradually becoming mainstream and the remote control principle has just been introduced. This Star Wars trilogy lover, who unfortunately didn’t have time to watch the sequels, clearly had a lot to teach us.
Asimov, the Eternal
For those unfamiliar with his works, Isaac Asimov is considered by many to be “the.”Father of modern science fiction“. Although he claims to have written more than 220 works, there are a few that definitely stand out from the crowd. This is particularly true for the Book Foundation, whose “series” included numerous sequels and prequels.Founding cycle“. This novel tells the story of an empire that is on the verge of collapse and must bring together the works of human civilization in its entirety in order to shorten the period of trouble that they will experience in the future. As a testament to the work’s influence, the book series received the 1966 Hugo Award for the best science fiction series of all time.. The famous laws of robotics also appear in this cycle. These are three laws that are an integral part of the gray memory of Asimov’s robots and have influenced practically all science fiction works published later.
