User:Nsh/Asimov-predition
Isaac Asimov, the first prophet of Wikipedia? Decide for yourselves...
I strumbled upon this passage in one of Asimov's excellent expostitions of (popular) science, written for the lay-reader. The name of the book is A Choice of Catastrophes (written in 1879!), and as the subtitle "The disasters that threaten our world" indicates discusses various potentials threats to the humanity whilst managinge to sneak a good deal of history and background theory by the reader in the process.
Towards the end of the book, as Asimov moves to a discussion of potentials problems facing society, he muses on the future of education and in his optimistic and insightful style, posits the following prediction, which reminded me of a certain someting...
(The following extract is reproduced in what I hope is fair-use under the relevant laws, though I have no doubt the author would be more than happy to have his idea shown here :-)
We might summarize the danger by saying that the sum total of human knowledge lacks an index, and that there is no efficient method of retrieval of information. How can we correct this but by calling on a more-than-human memory to serve as an index, and a faster-than-human system of retrieval to make use of the index?
In short, we need a computer, and for nearly forty years, we have been developing better, faster, more compact and more versatile computers at a breakneck pace. This trend should contunue if civilization remains intact, and in that case the computerization of knowledge is inevitable. More and more information will be recorded on microfilm and more and more of that will be accessible by computer.
There will be a tendancy to centralize information so that a request for particular items can tap the resources of all the libraries of a region, or of a nation, and, eventually, of the world. There will be the equivalent, at last, of a Global Computerized Library in which the total available knowledge of humanity will be stored and from which any item of that total can be retrieved on demand.
The manner in which such a library would be tapped is no mystery; the technique is on the way. We already have communications satellites that make is possible to connect any two points on the globe in a matter of fractions of a second.
.... [Brief digression on communication satellite history]
The time could come, then, when every human being would be assigned a specific television channel of his own, which could be tuned to a computer outlet that would be his or her connection with the gathered knowledge of the world. The equivalent of a television set would produce wanted material on a screen, or would reproduce it on a film or paper - stock-market quotations, news of the day, shopping opportunities, parts or all of a newspaper, magazine, or book.
The Global Computerized Library would be essential for scholars and for research, but this would represent a minor fraction of its use. It would represent an enormous revolution in education and, for the first time, offer us a scheme of education that would be truly open to all people of any age.
People after all want to learn. They have a three-pound brain in each skull which demands constant occupation to precent the painful disease of boredom. In default of anything better or more rewarding, it can be filled with the aimless visions of low-quality television programmes or the aimless sounds of low-quality recordings.
Even this poor material is preferable to schools as presently constituted, where the indicidual students are mass-fed certain stereotyped subjects at certain dictated speeds, without any regard for what it is the individual wishes to know and for how rapidly or slowly he can absorb the information.
What if, however, there were a device in a person's living quaters that would feed information to him or her on exactly what he or she wants to know: how to make love, details on the private lives of the kings of England, the rules of football, the history of the stage? What if all this were presented with endless patience, with endless repitition if necessary, and at a time and place of the learner's own choosing?
What if, having absorbed some of a subject, the learner were to ask for something more advanced, or a little to the side? What if some item in the information happened to fire a sudden new interest and sent the learner off in a completely new direction?
Why not? Surely more and more people would take this easy and natural way of satisfying curiosity and the desire to know. And each person, as he is educated in his own interests, could then begin to make contributions of his or her own. The person who had a new thought or observation of any kind in any field could report it, and if it did not duplicate something alreadyy in the library, it could be held for confirmation and, possibly, be added, eventually, to the common store. Each person would be a teacher as well as a learner.
With the ultimate library the ultimate teaching machine as well, would the teacher-learner lose all desire for human interaction? Would civilisation develop into a vast community of isolates , and would it break down in that fashion?
Why should it? No teaching machine could replace human contact in all areas. In athletics, in public speaking, in the dramatic arts, in explorations, in dacing, in lovemaking - no amount of bookishness would replace practice, though theory might improve it. People would still interact, and all the more intricately and pleasurably for knowing what they are doing.
In fact, we can rely on every human being to possess a missionary instinct in connection with whatever mattter he or she is devouringly interested in. The chess enthusiast tries to get others interested in chess and the same can be said, analogously, of fisherman, dancers, chemists, historians, joggers, antique-buyers, or anyone else. The person who probes the teaching machine and finds a fascination in weaving, or in the hisory of costumes, or in Roman coins would very likely make a determined effort to find others of like interests.
And this method of education by computer would surely be no respecter of age. It could be used by anyone at any age, with new interests starting in the sixties, perhaps, and old interests fading...
How close have we come to bringing about Asimov's utopian dream of this universal educational device? For someone who (I'm guessing) had not even been exposed to the idea of an internet, let alone a world-wide-web or wiki technologies, does this not seem like an amazingly close predication of what Wikipedia either already is, or can be envisioned to become? (Nor to mention, he obviously forsaw both reality TV and the current pop music scene ;-) Perhaps for an academic excercise, people would like to wikify the passage and allow people to see, even with the randomly chosen examples Asimov gave, how near we really are.
Anyhow, comments, notes and the glorious cetera are welcome. Thanks for taking the time to read this. May the prophecies of Asimov continue to be fulfilled.
62.248.177.192 23:49, 10 Sep 2004 (UTC)