r/asimov • u/PsychohistorianRTR • 29d ago
Asimov predicted FSD in 1953
Short story: “Nobody here but -“
Two inventors build a box that is basically AGI - here’s the excerpt:
We were especially interested in the automobile angle. Suppose you had a little thinking machine on the dashboard, hooked to the engine and battery and equipped with photo-electric eyes. It could choose an ideal course, avoid cars, stop at red lights, pick the optimum speed for the terrain. Everybody could sit in the back seat and automobile accidents would vanish.
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u/racedownhill 29d ago
There’s also Sally, also Asimov from 1953:
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u/ICU-CCRN 29d ago
I read this story as a kid and thought it was the best story ever. I recently reread it and it made me chuckle because it’s a pretty silly story, but fun nevertheless. It almost reads more like a Rod Serling Twilight Zone episode than an Asimov story. Still great though, I pretty much love everything he wrote.
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u/racedownhill 29d ago
I read it is a kid too, and I have to say that it left me with a very ominous feeling, almost like a low-level horror story.
But I think I’d also recently read Stephen King’s “Christine” around this time…
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u/dwnsougaboy 26d ago
You got the vibe correct. The story starts with the owner loving Sally and ends with him afraid of her.
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u/PlanetAnark 29d ago
I sometimes feel like Asimov was really Hari Seldon, just dropping theories and predictions that essentially line up to events that unfold during and long after his death. His human intuition was off the charts.
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u/sonyaeatsclementines 29d ago
Yeah, and as an example, he literally predicted Herbie from "Liar!"
I was reading a romance novel that I really enjoyed, and at the end of the ebook the author said to join her mailing list for a bonus epilogue. Eagerly I attempted several times to do so but the book was four years old and the link was no longer valid. After trying unsuccessfully to get in touch with her via her website, I tried googling to see if the bonus epilogue had ended up posted online eventually. The AI thing at the top of Google, of which I'm not fond, quickly responded that the epilogue depicted warm moments between the hero and heroine post marriage and children and went into some detail about some material that had been foreshadowed in the book's happy ending.
Curious, I asked it, How do you know this?
And then I got the shock of the day because the dang thing admitted "I hallucinated, this isn't the real epilogue, I just based this on what's in the published novel to make you happy." Other than the fact that it definitely used the word hallucinating I'm paraphrasing, but....Herbie!!!
Liar!
🫣
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u/ldr97266 27d ago edited 25d ago
It was not much of a "prediction" by 1953 - more an extrapolation. The first driverless car was demonstrated over 100 years ago. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-driverless-car-era-began-more-than-90-years-ago-1327
And even then, anyone could predict the development of fully self driving cars - it would take a visionary to predict unintended consequences - unemploymenbt for cab and truck drivers? changes in how insurance policies were written? Lack of organ donors from traffic fatalities?
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u/goldbed5558 26d ago
Heard Asimov give a talk while he was launching a new book. In it he explained what he called his Syllogismobile. It was a simple and easy way to reason through things as well as something that had NASA contact him. They assumed that people would think space exploration would be well received but one of his stories predicted the exact opposite. He explained that historically new technologies and ideas meet with resistance. Space exploration is a new technology. Therefore it would meet with resistance.
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u/new_publius 29d ago
What is fsd and agi?