Asimov was cautious: The robots of 2014 would “neither be common nor very good.” But in other respects, his expectations were high. Cars would be cruising through the air and entire cities would be built underwater. There was just one thing, ultimately, that worried him: the spread of boredom. Mankind, he wrote, would become “largely a race of machine tenders,” and there would be “serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences.” Psychiatry would be the largest medical specialty in 2014 due to the millions of people who found themselves adrift in a sea of “enforced leisure.” “Work,” he
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