Heinlein’s prescience

Earlier in life I read a lot of science fiction, but I’ve stayed in touch only intermittently since (mostly through cyberpunk and its descendants). Just recently, though, I had a conversation with a friend about old-school SF, which made me go back and reread some of it.

For me, the most fun of the really old guard (Asimov, Clarke, etc.) is Heinlein — he is the most consistently inventive. Sure, his books are suffused with an aggressive pro-American libertarian political philosophy, which can be off-putting at times, especially in the current political climate. (I recommended The Moon is a Harsh Mistress to a friend who grew up in India, and remembered too late that it is essentially a retelling of the American Revolution set on the moon, with lots of transplanted American patriotism. The straightforward and well-meant literary goal of making the universe safe for American-style democracy is a little bit more fraught these days…)

But what blows me away the most about Heinlein is his foresight. I know that pure prediction is not the goal of SF, but it’s always entertaining to notice when someone _does_ get it right.

For example, check out this quote from The Door Into Summer, written in 1956. (Remember that: 1956.) The protagonist is an honest-to-God entrepreneurial engineer trying to start a robotics company, and here’s his account of the first product, called Hired Girl:

“What Hired Girl would do (the first model, not the semi-intelligent robot I developed it into), was to clean floors … any floor, all day long and without supervision. And there was never a floor that didn’t need cleaning.

It swept, or mopped, or vacuum-cleaned, or polished, consulting tapes in its idiot memory to decide which. Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray on its upper surface, for someone brighter to decide whether to keep or throw away. It went quietly looking for dirt all day long, in search curves that could miss nothing, passing over clean floors in its endless search for dirty floors. It would get out of a room with people in it, like a well-trained maid, unless its mistress caught up with it and flipped a switch to tell the poor thing it was welcome. Around dinnertime it would go to its stall and soak up a quick charge — this was before we installed the everlasting power pack.

There was not too much difference between Hired Girl, Mark One, and a vacuum cleaner. But the difference — that it would clean without supervision — was enough; it sold.”

Can anyone say Roomba? This is in 1956, when the earliest proto-computers are room-filling monsters.

Here’s another one:
“… [I had] worked out in my head, in the last fifteen miles, two brand-new gadgets, either one of which could make me rich. One was a drafting machine, to be operated like an electric typewriter. I guessed that there must be easily fifty thousand engineers in the U.S. alone bending over drafting boards every day and hating it, because it gets you in your kidneys and ruins your eyes. Not that they didn’t want to design — they did want to — but physically it was much too hard work.

Cripes, for a small additional cost as an accessory, I could add a second easel, let an architect design in isometric (the only easy way to design) and have the second picture come out in perfect perspective rendering without his even looking at it. Why I could even set the thing to pull floor plans and elevations right out of the isometric.”

Can anyone say AutoCAD? This is in 1956, when electric typewriters were a really big deal — did any computer even have any kind of monitor (aka “easel”) yet? OK, so Heinlein failed to predict the mouse, but on the other hand it sound like he did predict the three-key chord instead. Can anyone say Ctrl-Alt-Delete?