1. Emotional Dependence

Ask anyone under the age of 30 to give up their mobile for a week and you’ll trigger immediate panic. “I can’t live without it!” is a genuine cry from the heart. This goes way beyond convenience – mobiles are our constant companions, always answering our questions and offering reassurance. It is an emotional dependency that was predicted by Asimov in the episode Robbie (1940), where a child forms a stronger relationship with her robot childminder than her parents, with far reaching consequences.

2. Internet of Everything

In The Evitable Conflict (1950) Asimov describes Machines which are “the vastest conglomeration of calculating circuits ever invented.” These Machines collect “a nearly infinite number of data in nearly infinitesimal time,” from all around the world, and use it to keep the global economy running smoothly.

Cut to the present day, and the internet of everything is busy embedding billions of everyday objects with microchips that stream information back to vast data-clouds which some people fear gives too much control to companies wanting to sell us more stuff and governments wanting to keep an eye on us.

3. Human Impotence

In the 1940s, movie heroes would routinely wrestle with the controls of aircraft, or become legends for their sharpshooting; but when Asimov put pen to paper, he envisioned a world where men would become impotent in the face of smart robots.

And that’s precisely the world we are now building around us – how many of us can still read a map and navigate through a city without electronic satnavs? How many of us could slam on the brakes and avoid skidding if the ABS was turned off? How many planes could land in fog without computers? Let’s face it, whenever we hear the phrase “switching to manual control”, we instinctively tighten our seatbelts because we know it’s going to be a bumpier ride than if the computer was in charge.

4. Intellectual Sophistication

One of the most striking things about I, Robot is the way Asimov maps the growing intellectual sophistication of AI. In the early stories the robots can’t even talk, but later in the book they are playing complex mind games with humans.

This is already a reality. A few weeks ago, a Japanese insurance company announced that it was replacing 34 key staff with super-smart Watson computers. These aren’t just going to handle routine enquiries, they’re going to make complex decisions about financial pay-outs. The company has put its bottom line into the hands of AI because the computers “can think like a human” enabling them to “analyse and interpret all of your data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video.”