Re: Dude, where’s my jetpack?, Dec. 27.
Thanks to Tom Spears for the entertaining piece on the legacy of futurism and predictions.
I have a theory about the one big mistake of past science-fiction writers, especially in regard to Spears’ last point (“Leisure? What leisure?”). Everyone from Isaac Asimov on down assumed robots would be created to do our menial work to free us up for thinking. What happened instead is that robots do our thinking for us, while we have been freed up for menial work.
Christopher Clute, Ottawa
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