[paganel]

When I first read Isaac Asimov's "The Naked Sun" as a kid in the early '90s I was thinking "hey, this is really only science fiction, we will never be like that". With the passing of years it seems that we get closer and closer to what I was actually thinking was only fiction. This is the story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Sun#Plot_introductio...

> The planet has a rigidly controlled population of twenty thousand, and robots outnumber humans ten thousand to one. People are strictly taught from birth to despise personal contact. They live on huge estates, either alone or with their spouse only. Communication is done via holographic telepresence (called viewing, as opposed to in-person seeing). It is likely that the society is based on that in E. M. Forster's 1909 short story "The Machine Stops".

Of course, the irony is that I had forgotten the exact name of the story and I had to use Google and a very fuzzy search to find it. And Google actually found it.