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" In 1964, Isaac Asimov visited the World&amp;#039;s Fair in New York and wrote a long essay for The New York Times about what one might expect from the World&amp;#039;s Fair in the unimaginably distant date of 2014, fifty years in the future. New Year&amp;#039;s, of course, is the time when we all sit around wondering what the year in front of us holds. Will Google Glass catch on? Will Bitcoin develop into the world&amp;#039;s most stable currency? Will Rob Ford be re-elected? &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know, but I can guess,&amp;quot; Asimov wrote in the Times. He of course was better prepared to guess than most, being hugely intelligent and having spent most of his life thinking about the nature of the future. Which is why what he got right and what he got wrong are so revealing. There are inevitably howlers. For instance, the prediction that we would all be living in basements has failed to pan out: &amp;quot;There is an underground house at the fair which is a sign of the future. if its windows are not polarized, they can nevertheless alter the &amp;#039;scenery&amp;#039; by changes in lighting. Suburban houses underground, with easily controlled temperature, free from the vicissitudes of weather, with air cleaned and light controlled, should be fairly common. At the New York World&amp;#039;s Fair of 2014, General Motors&amp;#039; &amp;#039;Futurama&amp;#039; may well display vistas of underground cities complete with light- forced vegetable gardens. The surface, G.M. will argue, will be given over to large-scale agriculture, grazing and parklands, with less space wasted on actual human occupancy.&amp;quot; He is a little better on the possibilities of computers:  &amp;quot;Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The I.B.M. exhibit at the present fair has no robots but it is dedicated to computers, which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence?&amp;quot; Porn was in the works, it turned out, Isaac. Porn and cats with funny expressions and news sites devoted only to positive news and a site where you can only write things using 140 characters or less. But computers occupied only a tiny part of Asimov&amp;#039;s imagination. In 1964, a lot more exciting things were going on. Asimov fully expected communication with colonies on the moon and Mars, and wondered how we would deal with the time delays due to the speed of light. Such errors are natural enough. Asimov&amp;#039;s extrapolations were from what he knew, so he assumed that &amp;quot;Boston-to-Washington, the most crowded area of its size on the earth, will have become a single city with a population of over 40,000,000.&amp;quot; Sometimes he gets awfully close in the weirdest ways: &amp;quot;The 2014 fair will feature an Algae Bar at which &amp;#039;mock-turkey&amp;#039; and &amp;#039;pseudosteak&amp;#039; will be served. It won&amp;#039;t be bad at all.&amp;quot; We do have pretty decent mock-turkey and pseudosteak, but they&amp;#039;re made out of soybeans.  The most startling aspect of Asimov&amp;#039;s prediction, however, is its fundamental optimism. For Asimov, the world is a series of difficulties, which serious members of the duly elected bodies will confront and, following the advice of engineers, solve through technology. Technology, for Asimov, was the solution to the world&amp;#039;s problems. That&amp;#039;s the difficulty of prediction. You can only imagine change the way things are changing during the time in which you are living. The idea of technology as disruption would never have occurred to him. Fifty years from now, no doubt the idea that technology is disruptive will, in turn, appear equally ridiculous.  The good news is that Asimov&amp;#039;s boldest predictions, the ones he clearly thought were the craziest, are some of the most accurate. He predicted the idea of a creative class, and also the death of a moneyed &amp;quot;leisure class.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine. Indeed, the most somber speculation I can make about A.D. 2014 is that in a society of enforced leisure, the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!&amp;quot; This is perhaps the most encouraging thing we can learn from Asimov&amp;#039;s imagination. It&amp;#039;s best to predict boldly, to imagine wildly. Only the weird things turn out to happen for real. Read More Stephen Marche on The Culture Blog &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/cars/a26662/2014-50-years-ago/>