There’s a must-read piece at Slate on Isaac Asimov’s classic novel The Caves of Steel, part of a trilogy of novels about societies where everybody lives hundreds of years and relies on robots for everything. After a terrific summary, Konstantin Kakaes explains why it’s all still relevant.
In a nutshell, Caves of Steel is a murder mystery about a “spacer” visiting from Aurora, where everybody lives 300 to 350 years. And as in many similar long-lived fictional societies, creativity is stifled by the long lifespans and progress slows to a crawl. In the sequel, The Naked Sun, Elijah Baley visits Solaria, an even longer-lived society where the population size is tiny and everybody is isolated from everybody else.
Obviously, a lot of people nowadays are predicting that human lifespans will soon be extended way past the roughly hundred-year limit that most humans currently face. Kakaes explains why Asimov’s warnings are still relevant:
Nobody now lives in the isolation
of a Solarian, and yet my office is filled with people who prefer to
send emails to one another instead of walking 10 seconds to briefly
converse. (I suspect this is not atypical.) The children of the
privileged are raised in structured, sheltered environments that have
more of a common feel with Asimov’s Aurora, filled with individualistic
strivers, than they do with the Earth of Caves, in which kids roughhouse harmlessly, blowing off steam in a shinier version of the 1950s.
His books are useful antigens to Whiggish ideas
of technological progress. Earth will never become Aurora. But the
tonier parts of Silicon Valley are already starting to resemble it.
Asimov viewed part of the task of science fiction as accustoming readers
to the idea of change, to the knowledge that “things will be
different,” and so to help them plan for change with wisdom. Part of
that wisdom is undertaking a healthy skepticism of technological fixes
to problems like aging.
The whole thing is well worth reading. [Slate]
