Best futurists ever: Some big hits from Arthur C. Cla rke’s predictions

Casagiannoni has a quite limited knowledge,
and keeps distaining the ideas of Arthur Clarke
when I have mentioned them here.  Casagiannoni
mocks them as only being silly fiction, and thus
not worthy of consideration.

I understand, that some fiction is pure fantasy,
and irrelevant to the real world.
But Casagiannoni should inform himself to know
that Arthur Clarke was serious about real ideas.
Clarke was the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society
from 1946–1947 and again in 1951–1953.

from
https://rossdawson.com/futurist/best-futurists-ever/arthur-c-clarke/

Best futurists ever: The big hits and the misses from Arthur C.
Clarke’s eccentric and influential predictions

By Martin Anderson

By the time acclaimed director Stanley Kubrick picked Arthur C. Clarke 
out from contemporaries such as A.E. Van Vogt and Robert Heinlein to 
collaborate on the ground-breaking 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in 1964, 
the English science fiction author was already perhaps the most 
influential futurist of the 20th century. He was certainly the most famous.

For over sixty years Clarke produced ‘hard’ sci-fi novels and short 
stories that balanced a fertile speculative imagination with a 
characteristic scientific rigor. His work was informed by his background 
in mathematics and physics, and enriched by his professional association 
with the telecommunications and space industries of his era.

The cultural impact of 2001 would seal his position as the go-to 
authority on the future until his death in 2008. However, his prophecies 
were products of a more optimistic time — perhaps one reason for their 
enduring appeal.

He was never reluctant to speculate, and the sheer volume of his 
predictions included some noteworthy eccentricities — as we’ll see shortly.

1: Communications satellites
Prior to his two-year presidency of the British Interplanetary Society 
from 1946, Clarke wrote a famous essay in Wireless World, suggesting the 
possibility of re-using Nazi V2 rocket technology to place satellites in 
a geostationary orbit around the earth in order to create a global relay 
network.

An “artificial satellite” at the correct distance from the earth would 
make one revolution every 24 hours; i.e., it would remain stationary 
above the same spot and would be within optical range of nearly half the 
earth’s surface. Three repeater stations, 120 degrees apart in the 
correct orbit, could give television and microwave coverage to the 
entire planet.

The Wireless World letter earned Clarke general recognition as the 
originator of the idea of the geosynchronous satellite, which now 
officially occupied a ‘Clarke orbit’. Later, the author modestly 
described his inspiration for geostationary orbit as ‘the only original 
idea of my life’.

However the concept builds on earlier calculations and theorems by 
Russian scientist and mathematician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Tsiolkovsky, 
like Clarke, was a scientist whose passions extended into the writing of 
visionary science-fiction. It was he who first calculated the 8 km per 
second velocity necessary to escape the earth’s orbit. He also 
anticipated the multi-stage boosters likely to be necessary to achieve 
this, as Clarke describes in his 1945 letter.

2: Remote surgery
In the 1975 novel Imperial Earth, Clarke describes how serious a problem 
an unreliable or ‘laggy’ network connection can be, when the data being 
delayed is the movement of a surgeon’s hands to control a robot that’s 
performing an operation:

“Hawaii’s almost exactly on the other side of the world–which means you 
have to work through two comsats in series. During tele-surgery, that 
extra time delay can be critical.” So even on Earth, thought Duncan, the 
slowness of radio waves can be a problem. A half-second lag would not 
matter in conversation; but between a surgeon’s hand and eye, it might 
be fatal.

In this novel, Clarke developed a prediction he had made publicly in 1964:

I’m perfectly serious when I suggest that one day we may have brain 
surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand.

The author was entirely correct to predict that network issues would 
hamper the progress of remote surgery. It’s estimated that connection 
latency for tele-surgery needs to be no higher than 1ms — a very 
ambitious target, even with new 5G networks, and special compression 
methods to transmit haptic data (touch-based feedback for surgeons).

In February 2015 an experimental cardiac telesurgery was hampered by 
such communications glitches, including low voice quality between the 
on-site team and the remote surgeon, and poor dexterity from the 
surgical robot. The details of the incident came to light in an inquiry 
in November of 2018.

The use of remote surgeons had interested NASA since the 1970s, because 
of the potential to treat serious injuries in space missions where no 
medical doctors might be present. By the early 1980s the first concrete 
proposals had emerged, culminating in current efforts to develop 
robot-assisted surgical technologies for potential manned Mars-flights.

The first known use of robotic surgery occurred over twenty years after 
Clarke’s initial prediction, when the PUMA 560 C inserted a needle into 
a patient’s brain for a biopsy.

In 2001, a French-Canadian medical team pioneered a remote gallbladder 
removal, with the surgeon operating from New York on a patient in 
France. The endeavor was named ‘The Lindbergh Operation’, in honor of 
Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic crossing in 1927.

NASA remote medical
Image: Zero gravity surgery module, NASA

3: The internet
In an interview with Australian TV in 1974, Clarke was asked by a 
reporter what the world of 2001 would look like for his own young son by 
the year 2001.

He will have in his own house [a console] through which he can talk to 
his friendly local computer and get all the information he needs for his 
everyday life; his bank statements, his theater reservations…all the 
information you need in the course of living in a complex modern society.

This will be in a compact form in his own house. He’ll have a 
[television screen] and a keyboard, and he’ll talk to the computer and 
get information from it. He’ll take it as much for granted as we take 
the telephone.

At an MIT press conference two years later, Clarke expanded on the kind 
of interactive technology that would enable email and other forms of 
network messaging that are now familiar to us:

It would be a high-definition TV screen, and a typewriter keyboard, and 
through this you can exchange any type of information, send messages to 
your friends. They can wait and when they get up they can see what 
messages have come in the night.

Twelve years earlier, this vision of a networked society had already 
taken shape in Clarke’s mind. In an interview for the BBC program 
Horizon in 1964, Clarke said:

[Communications satellites] will make possible a world in which we can 
make instant contact with each other wherever we may be. Where we can 
contact our friends anywhere on Earth, even if we don’t know their 
actual physical location. It will be possible in that age, perhaps only 
fifty years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or 
Bali just as well as he could from London.

Imperial Earth features a device called a Comsole, a terminal to a vast 
repository of information, complete with its own search engine:

All the libraries and museums that had ever existed could be funneled 
through this screen and the millions like it scattered over the face of 
Earth. Even the least sensitive of men could be overwhelmed by the 
thought that one could operate a Comsole for a thousand life-times–and 
barely sample the knowledge stored within the memory banks that lay 
triplicated in their widely separated caverns…

4: Search engines
More specifically, Clarke’s predictions for how we would ultimately 
locate information were to prove far more accurate than most of his 
contemporaries. At the 1976 MIT conference, Clarke describes information 
retrieval in the future:

You can call in through [a console] any information you want: airline 
flights, price of things at the supermarket, books you’ve always wanted 
to read…

News, selectively; you can tell the machine I’m interested in such and 
such items, sports, politics and so forth, and the machine will go to 
the main central library and bring all this to you, selectively – just 
what you want; not all the junk that you have to get when you buy the 
two or three pounds of wood pulp which is the daily newspaper.

Though Clarke’s vision does not include the kind of prototype pointing 
devices in development at Palo Alto Research Center around this period, 
it is a remarkably accurate view of a modern laptop search, from an age 
where punch-cards still had more than a decade of life left in them.

5: Spam mail and personalized ad targeting
At one point in 1975’s Imperial Earth, a Comsole user receives one of 
the earliest examples of spam communications based on data mining:

“[There] are some smart operators around, on the lookout for innocents 
from space. Yesterday I was going through a display of Persian carpets — 
antique, not replicated — wondering if I could possibly afford to take a 
small one back to Marissa. (I can’t.) This morning there was a message — 
addressed to me personally, correct room number — from a dealer in 
Tehran, offering his wares at very special rates. He’s probably quite 
legitimate, and may have some bargains–but how did he know? I thought 
Comsole circuits were totally private. But perhaps this doesn’t apply to 
some commercial services. Anyway, I didn’t answer.”

Today we are all too familiar with creepily apt ads enabled by tracking 
technologies that use our online history to define our demographic 
status and target advertising campaigns at us.

6: Tablet computing device and interface
The small form factor tablet device was prefigured in a number of 
science fiction properties from the 1950s onwards, notably in the Star 
Trek TV series in development at the same time as 2001. Trek‘s Personal 
Access Display Device (PADD), featured in The Original Series (1966-69), 
was stylus-operated. Its 1980s successor went on to inspire the 
touch-driven interface of Apple’s iPad.

However, the Newspad from 2001: A Space Odyssey differs from both 
iterations of the Star Trek device in that it describes the thumbnail 
interfaces we are now familiar with:

One by one he would conjure up the world’s major electronic papers; he 
knew the codes of the more important ones by heart, and had no need to 
consult the list on the back of his pad. Switching to the display unit’s 
short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly 
searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him.

Each had its own two-digit reference; when he punched that, the 
postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the 
screen and he could read it with comfort. When he had finished, he would 
flash back to the complete page and select a new subject for detailed 
examination.

7: The rise of digital and network pornography
In a 1959 essay published in The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke, 
the author describes a real-life encounter with a U.S. network executive 
excited by the possibilities that satellites and new communications 
technologies might give rise to in the field of adult entertainment. 
After a number of meetings, Clarke is shown a proposed reel for 
transmission.

“My God!” I said, when I had recovered some of my composure. “Are you 
going to telecast that?”

Hartford laughed.

“Believe me,” he answered, “that’s nothing; it just happens to be the 
only reel I can carry around safely. We’re prepared to defend it any day 
on grounds of genuine art, historic interest, religious tolerance—oh, 
we’ve thought of all the angles. But it doesn’t really matter; no one 
can stop us. For the first time in history, any form of censorship’s 
become utterly impossible. There’s simply no way of enforcing it; the 
customer can get what he wants, right in his own home. Lock the door, 
switch on the TV set—friends and family will never know.”

In a rare note of depression, Clarke concludes that his contribution to 
new network communications may ‘have unwittingly triggered an avalanche 
that may sweep away much of Western civilization’, and laments his 
connection with ‘this whole sordid business’.

By 1999, the subject of digital pornography had entered Clarke’s output 
directly. There are references to intercepting porn in The Trigger, a 
novel concerned with the social impact of technology and co-written with 
Michael P. Kube-McDowell.

The 1988 novel Cradle, this time co-written with Gentry Lee, features a 
videogame (loaded from several compact discs) which contains interactive 
sex scenes based on popular pornographic stars.

Failure to launch: the incorrect predictions of Arthur C. Clarke
It’s a mistake to do the maths on Clarke’s prediction success rate and 
assume he was ‘carpet-bombing’ in the hope of getting at least a few 
hits. Most of his more doubtful prophecies came towards the end of his 
career, when he seemed to be getting more personal amusement than 
professional benefit from his prognostications.

These more outlandish later foretellings included: the discovery of the 
first human clone in 2004; the return of soil samples from Mars in 2005; 
the closure of the last coal mine in 2006; the destruction of all 
nuclear weapons in 2008; the abolition of all existing currencies in 
2016; the end of professional criminals via electronic monitoring in 
2009 (though this does now provide a cost-saving possibility for prison 
systems); the ascension of AI to ‘human level’ in 2020; 
genetically-cloned dinosaurs in 2023; and many other wild speculations.

Of his ‘golden age’ mis-predictions of the 1960s, two are often singled 
out, and both are special cases:

Simian servants
Clarke predicted in the 1964 Horizon special that bioengineering would 
make possible a race of slaves based on monkeys. With an amused smile, 
the author said:

[With] our present knowledge of animal psychology, and genetics, we 
could certainly solve the servant problem with the help of the monkey 
kingdom. Of course, eventually our super-chimpanzees would start forming 
trade unions, and we’d be right back where we started.

Clarke made this broadcast a year after Pierre Boule’s science-fiction 
novel La Planète des Singes (Monkey Planet) was published, presenting an 
imagined world where apes are the dominant intelligent species. This 
event seems, logically, to have fueled Clarke’s off-beat prediction.

The book would eventually become the hit 1968 U.S. sci-fi movie Planet 
Of The Apes, with later sequels that closely follow Clarke’s forecast of 
a monkey uprising.

Telecommuting

However, telecommuting was no joke for Clarke; his interest in using new 
telecommunications technology to shrink the world was both personal and 
visionary, a promise of general technological emancipation that formed 
the background of many of his other predictions.

The author’s prediction of remote surgery was part of a much wider 
prevision of a remote work culture that would finally discard the 
polluted, centralized cities of the previous 150 years:

[Men] will no longer commute – they will communicate. They won’t have to 
travel for business any more — they’ll only travel for pleasure. I only 
hope that when that day comes, and the city is abolished, the whole 
world isn’t turned into one giant suburb.

In reality, the more that improved broadband and other technologies have 
enabled telecommuting, the greater corporate resistance has grown to the 
trend. Companies which were once pioneers of remote work for employees 
have reversed their policies in the last few years, while the explosive 
growth in urban property prices in major cities suggests that cities are 
set to consolidate and grow rather than become redundant nodes in a 
net-driven virtual workplace.

Since decentralizing is such a radical prospect, the possible reasons 
for the failure of telecommuting are many: the impact that it would have 
on many economic areas, from transport through to hotels; the 
destabilization of the urban property prices that have underwritten the 
recovery from the 2008 financial crisis; and even just plain distrust of 
the remote employee.

A utopian standpoint
Well into his fifties, Clarke was already considered one of the ‘Big 
Three’ most influential authors of the Golden Age of science fiction 
(together with Isaac Asimov and Heinlein) when his association with 
Kubrick pushed him to the apogee of his fame.

The aspirational tone of his predictions was informed by a post-war 
culture which had led to new social contracts and general prosperity 
across the west.

Even the Cold War tensions which had arisen in the aftermath of the 
Second World War were now fueling Clarke’s dreams, in the form of the 
Space Race.

As consciousness around the Vietnam war began to give rise to a new 
counterculture, and to more dystopian trends in science fiction, Clarke 
retrenched. To the end of his career, he would maintain a positive 
standpoint about the potential of technology to improve the lot of mankind.

If some of these predictions (particularly around telecommuting) did not 
account for social or economic resistance, or for the eventual fading of 
the progressive post-war spirit, it’s understandable. Clarke’s 
generation had led the world out of darkness, and his writing was a 
natural evolution of the emancipated utopias envisaged by Victorian 
masters such as H.G. Wells. For a time, such perfected visions of 
humanity’s future seemed a fitting and even likely reward for the 
horrors of the Second World War.

His view emerged from a post-war society which, quite literally, saw no 
other way than ‘up’. Clarke could not predict that the economics of the 
1970s would foreshorten the Apollo program, or that mankind would scale 
back its interest in space exploration so drastically, and for so long.

Since Clarke dealt very little in dystopias, his science fiction works 
were not primarily intended as warning bells for society, but rather as 
inspirational reflections. From that standpoint, one could argue that 
they served no purpose other than to amuse. Indeed, Clarke seemed to 
approach prophecy more as a wry marketing tool than a serious map of the 
future:

Trying to predict the future is a discouraging and hazardous occupation, 
because the prophet invariably falls between two stools:

If his predictions sound at all reasonable, you can be quite sure that 
in twenty or, at most, fifty years, the progress of science and 
technology has made him seem ridiculously conservative.

On the other hand, if, by some miracle, a prophet could describe the 
future exactly as it was going to take place, his predictions would 
sound so absurd, so far-fetched, that everybody would laugh him to scorn.

This has proved to be true in the past, and it will undoubtedly be true, 
even more so, of the century to come. The only thing we can be sure of 
about the future is that it will be absolutely fantastic.

So if what I say now seems to you to be very reasonable, then I’ll have 
failed completely. Only if what I tell you appears absolutely 
unbelievable, have we any chance of visualizing the future as it really 
will happen.