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History Lessons

Mar 31, ’18 2:33 PM

“A century ago cars were seized upon as a solution to the drawbacks of horses, which were clogging city streets with manure. The broader social consequences of cars, both good and bad, were entirely unforeseen. Today the danger is that AVS will be treated merely as a technological solution to the problems associated with cars and that, once again, the wider impacts will be overlooked. AVS have the potential to transform physical transport as radically as packet-switching transformed the delivery of data. But as with the internet, realising their benefits is a matter of politics as well as technology. AVS offer a chance to forge a new and better trade-off between personal mobility and social impact—but only if the lesson of the horseless carriage is applied to the era of the driverless car.”

“Who is Behind the Wheel,” The Economist, March 3, 2018

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Foretelling the Future.

Sep 19, ’10 5:51 PM

I have been reading Isaac Asimov’s Prelude to Foundation (first published in 1988) off and on over the past several months.  I found it interesting that several passages towards the middle of the book bear a close resemblance to features found within Amazon’s Kindle:

Display:

“The pages aren’t blank, they’re covered with microprint.  [..]  If I press this little nubbin on the inner edge of the cover – Look!”  The pages to which the book lay open was suddenly covered with lines of print that rolled slowly upward.

Navigation:

Seldon said, “You can adjust the rate of upward movement to match your reading speed by slightly twisting the nubbin one way or the other.  When the lines of print reach their upward limit – when you reach the bottom line, that is – they snap downward and turn off.  You turn to the next page and continue.”

Power:

[…] “Where does the energy come from that does all this?”

“It has an enclosed microfusion battery that lasts the life of the book.”

Storage:

[…] This type of book has its advantages.  It holds far more than an ordinary visual book does.”

Whether the origins of the Kindle started with these passages, I am unsure.  In any case, Asimov’s role was not to develop an electronic reader – rather it was to develop an idea that others could take and build upon.  In this particular case, this fictional concept was eventually developed into a real product.

This is important to understand because the lifespan of a given concept is, I think, undefined.  We may never know where Asimov obtained the seeds for these passages, just as we do not yet know what other technologies may come from the electronic reader.

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