now let's look ahead to the Future from this point on first is seen by the man some call the number one futurist around he's Isaac Isaac azimoff author of more than 250 books light and heavy fiction and non-fiction some of the most notable being about the future the azimoff vision of it at least technologically let's see what major developments you see coming Mr azimoff for for instance in space anything left out there that you see coming still oh everything so far we have only been exploring space we are still in the Christopher Columbus stage as
far as space is concerned what remains now is to actually make use of space to get out and stay there more or less permanently to set up space stations to build solar power stations to uh have Laboratories and factories that can do things in space that are difficult or impossible to do on Earth and eventually to have space settlements in which thousands of people can be housed more or less permanently do you think that's actually going to happen or is that just a I mean it's possible to do it but do you think it's actually
going to happen in these next several years well as to whether it's actually going to happen that's the choice that Humanity has to make we can decide not to do it but we can also decide to do it because the technology is there it would be expensive require a great deal of time energy Manpower Etc but on the whole not as much expense and effort and emotional input as for instance to maintain our military machines year after year if we could if we could put in half a trillion dollars a year on Space instead of
on Military machines there are almost no limits to what we can do what's the point of it what's the point of doing all that well for one thing we'll gain new sources of energy new sources of materials we'll gain new knowledge we'll make new technologies possible we'll be moving out from an earth which is relatively worn out by thousands of years of human depredations not vicious depredations necessarily just the fact we've been living here and making use of its resources into into new territory and be able to build a larger and more elaborate civilization and
one which does not depend upon the resources of one world all right speaking of what might happen though back here on Earth uh the computers uh computers have really really come into their own in these last few years what do you see ahead for the computer age have we crested on that one as well oh no no no the computer is at the center of everything the computer is a problemsolving device it is a technique that makes it possible to do things that would be utterly impossible without it we couldn't reach the moon without the
computer we require the computer to handle the these spaceships that we're making use of everything we do in space we won't be able to do without banks of computers doing thinking faster than we possibly can and in the same way the advance of robots depends entirely upon the computer in fact the simplest way of defining a robot is as a computerized machine do you see a time where computers at at the basic human level and homes and that sort of thing will that every will have a computer will have to have computers in order to
ex exist and make it down here on Earth it's not even a matter of having to have it they'll want to uh when when television first came in in 1948 it was easy to predict that everybody would want to have a television set simply because it was primarily used for entertainment well uh computers are going to be necessary in the house to do a great many things some in the way of entertainment some of the way of making life a little easier and everyone will want it and the home computer will is the wave of
the future what do you see you mentioned robots and uh we saw at the beginning that uh there were a lot of scary things involved in the 20s when predicting the the uh the coming of the robot what do you see the robot's Place being in our future well it's scary but not for the reasons they always saw it they saw the robots as being somehow imitation human being that were vicious and soulless that's not so uh we now know that robots are simply machines that do what they're told to do but they replace human
beings it's not that they kill them but they kill their jobs uh they'll create more jobs and they kill but there'll be different jobs and the people whose jobs are lost may not easily be educ education educ educable there it is uh into new jobs uh so that we are are going to have to accept an important role society as a whole in making sure that the transition period from the preotic uh technology to the post robotic technology is as painless as possible we have to make sure that people aren't treated as though they're used
up Dish Rags that they have to be allowed to live and retain their self-respect work has to be found for them those who can be educated into new jobs should be those who can be transferred fit it in somewhere else should be this is not going to be easy and the transition period will be starting almost at once finally let me ask you this in a word Mr azimoff when you look ahead to the Future do you see see the world in optimistic terms I mean you see good things ahead would you would you classify
yourself as being an optimistic futurist I'm a hopeful Optimist in other words I hope things will be optimistic it is up to humanity to make the decisions we can decide to specialize in hatred and suspicion and end up with a nuclear war which will destroy everything or we can decide to cooperate and overcome our suspicions and hatreds in which case I see an endlessly receding Horizon with no foreseeable way of coming to an end to Greatness thank you the the threat of nuclear war it's something that that has very much been in the public mind
in the last several months uh as you know I want to start with you and ask what each of you when you look in your crystal balls what do you see in that regard well with regard to nuclear war the first thing I see is that 40 years has passed and no one has had the nerve to start one I see a public opinion which every year becomes more alive to the dangers there of and more insistent that the risks be lowered uh it's just a question as to whether uh the general public perception of
nuclear war is something that must not happen can overcome the what I might call the conventional military mind of all the things that you see in the future what excit you the most as as a person and I mean just just really turns you on when you think about if this wonderful thing could happen oh what excites me most is the thought of an understanding of the human brain far deeper than any we have now I'm hoping that by the use of computers that perhaps by the construction of artificial intelligence we can be able to
understand the most complex conglomeration of matter that we know of the human brain which is at one and the same time our greatest hope and our greatest danger it's in the brain that all advances can be planned it's in the brain that all dangers can be expected and I want to understand [Music] that in 1902 this was a French film Maker's fanciful view of the future as we know his vision of flying to the Moon wasn't so crazy but what are today's Visionaries predicting for the future good evening 1982 has been a year of remarkable
developments in science and technology the first permanent artificial heart is working inside the chest of Barney Clark genetic engineering has produced a new jumbo sized Mouse just this week scientists at Princeton for the first time successfully tested a fusion reactor perhaps the the precursor of a safer cheaper form of nuclear energy robots began taking the place of men in US autop plants and Time Magazine selected the computer as its Man of the Year each one of these advances seemed impossibly romantic only a few decades ago but as technology advances so does the art of predicting
future advances and we thought New Year's Eve an appropriate time to look at how accurate some of the Visionaries of the past have been and what current futurists see ahead of us Robin it's always been a mixed bag when it comes to Visionaries and their Visions in the early 1900s the populace was gripped for a while by wild and scary predictions about mechanical people robots the word robot was coined in fact in a very downbeat 1921 play called rur for rossum's Universal robots which ended with an earth occupied only by mechanical people the humankind having
destroyed themselves a few years later the German filmmaker Fritz Lang created his vision of metropolis where a mad scientist creates a robot to replace enslaved human workers all of whom would be eliminated as a cost-saving measure but in 1955 a not so mad real life scientist shared a vision that proved to be right on the mark remarkably so the scientist was Werner Von braa and he did it on a Walt Disney television program called man in space let's look ahead a few years and see how this might be accomplished [Music] [Music] the [Music] [Music] 25
years later the actual photographs of the US space shuttle mission were stunningly similar to these make believe ones in the 1930s there was a wave of exuberant and sometimes outlandish predictions about what the future would look like for example they thought skyscrapers were doomed and would be replaced by vast underground cities some thought that flying would become as common as driving and that we would all have our own personal Auto planes but some of the predictions came very close to the mark they envisioned for example harnessing the power of the Sun for energy the Forerunner
to today's solar power then there was the projection that one day man would be able to capture movies on common photograph records that's only now coming into popular use in today's video discs
