Bill Interviews Arthur C. Clarke

         Science Fiction's Arthur Clarke's Wrong Call

         Balanced  By His Prediction Of The Internet    

Who would have thought that an infusion of illegal immigrants in America would become a "hot potato" issue during the frist decade of the next millenium? Certainly not the late science and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, "Mr. 2001."

Clarke in 1969 envisioned a world where "universal liesure" would exist and a bored population would be created by a population of unemployed humans who would be replaced by robots and machines that would do all the work?

To prove Clarke did make such a wrong prediction, I used my personal "time machine" to go back to October 6, 1969. Well, all I really did do was roll out a file folder drawer from my office file cabinet. At the time was a reporter and science columnist for the Springfield Daily News, Springfield, Ohio. On that date, Clarke was in town to give a talk student's at Springfield's Wittenberg University. Earlier in 1969, Clarke and movie producer Stanley Kubrick had won an Oscar nomination for their science fiction movie "2001: A Space Odyssey."

The title for my Clarke interview published in the newspaper was "By 2001 We Must Dis-invent Work." He startled the overflow crowd in the largest room of the Wittenberg student union by saying that "society will have no place for anyone as ignorant as mid-twentieth century college graduates." Forseeing an idleness problem, Clarke suggested "education combined with entertainment will be needed" to prevent boredom, while he noted that "uneducated people are bored to death if they can't work."

Clearly, Clarke had tuned his crystal ball to the wrong channel in 1969 when he forsaw an age of "universal liesure" here in the new millennium. His prophecy that "only a few managment level jobs will be left" and that to get one "a person would have to be more highly educated" is laughable today. Our many immigrant workers here in America today seem able to learn sufficient English to get lower "entry level" jobs.

Was Clarke reading too many of the robot stories of Issac Asimov, a fellow member of the Asimov-Clarke-Heinlein "Big Three" of science fiction in the 60s and 70s? Perhaps. However, Clarke, now deceased, did make one highly accurate prediction in 1969 that more people should have paid attention to back then. He told me there would be a time "in the near future" when virtually "every man on earth will own a communications console enabling him to communicate with everyone else on the face of the earth and have access to every available recorded fact in a sort of "global library" via satellite. 

Clarke thus clearly predicted the use of personal computers and of the worldwide web "www" on the Internet. He saw this prediction as one made possible by communications satellites. Clarke, of course, was the originator of the idea of having the satellites in his geosynchonous orbit as outlined in his 1945 technical paper on the subject. It was unclear to me in 1969 how this would work, but it is clear now that he was predicting personal computers linked to the World Wide Web.

However, Clarke didn't see the eventual superiority of today's global network of undersea cables and land lines for worldwide communications. These eliminate the old annoying delay for two-way voice communcations imposed by the speed of light over the up and down distance to Clarke's 11,500 mile geosynchronous orbit. Satellite links are only necessary now for TV and radio communications in remote places beyond the reach of the worldwide cable network.  I certainly saw this coming after joining the public relatios staff a the Labs.

As a science fiction reader and fan since grade school, I was just delighted to have Clarke to interview in 1969. Just as I did with Gene Roddenberry, I was able to spent an hour with this superstar of science and science fiction. And I found him not overly impressed with himself as a seer of the future or as a superstar of science fiction. Neither was he. I recall he introduced himself and amused his audience by opening with the remark that "I'm here to talk about a subject that doesn't exist and of which I know nothing."

Now forty years later, we live in an over polluted and over populated world. Such a future was predicted in some science fiction stories many decades ago, but certainly did not provide science fiction fans with that old "sense of wonder" about the future. This was what did the best job of selling science fiction books, TV shows and movies; and this was the basic thing the fans wanted.