What Isaac Asimov Taught Us About Predicting the Future

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: November 1, 2018 12:38:03 JST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] What Isaac Asimov Taught Us About Predicting the Future
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Mike Cheponis.  DLH]
>
> What Isaac Asimov Taught Us About Predicting the Future
> By Alec Nevala-Lee
> Oct 31 2018
> <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/31/books/review/isaac-asimov-psychohistory.html>
>
> In February, the spaceflight company founded by Elon Musk conducted a test launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket, which 
> successfully sent its payload into orbit around the sun. Its cargo included a Tesla Roadster — which now looks like a 
> sign of Musk’s midlife crisis — and a digital copy of the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov. Two months later, Apple 
> announced that it was developing a television version of the classic science-fiction saga for its new streaming 
> service. Previous attempts to adapt the series have failed, which might not have surprised Asimov, who, after 
> rereading it, confessed, “I couldn’t help noticing, of course, that there was not very much action in it.”
>
> If the Foundation trilogy still appeals to a wide audience — as well as to corporations hoping to associate 
> themselves with its vision of tomorrow — this has less to do with the plots or characters than with the books’ 
> fictional science of psychohistory, a system for predicting future events even thousands of years from the present. 
> The notion captivated fans like the economist Paul Krugman, who recalled of the mathematician and psychologist 
> portrayed by Asimov as the creator of psychohistory: “I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon.” The books made an equally 
> profound impression on a teenage Newt Gingrich, who later wrote, “For a high school student who loved history, 
> Asimov’s most exhilarating invention was the ‘psychohistorian’ Hari Seldon.”
>
> The historical moment that inspired Asimov has striking parallels to our own. On Aug. 1, 1941, Asimov, then a 
> 21-year-old writer and graduate student at Columbia University, was riding the subway in New York. He was headed to 
> his monthly meeting with John W. Campbell Jr., the editor of the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction, whom 
> Asimov later praised as an intellectual mentor and “the most powerful force in science fiction ever.” On the train, 
> Asimov came up with the premise for a story about the decline of a galactic empire, and when he described it in the 
> meeting that afternoon, he remembered, “Campbell blazed up as I had never seen him do.”
>
> Yet Campbell was drawn less to the story line than to the opportunity it suggested for exploring the idea of 
> forecasting the future, which doesn’t seem to have been part of Asimov’s initial pitch. The year before, shortly 
> after German troops marched into Paris, Campbell had published an article by the writer L. Sprague de Camp on the 
> theories of historians like Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Toynbee, who conceived of civilization as a series of 
> recurring cycles. As the world entered an era of frightening instability, Campbell urged his writers to expand on a 
> theme later expressed by a character in a story he printed by Jack Williamson: “It remained for me to reduce the laws 
> of the rise and fall of human cultures to the exact science that I call destiny.”
>
> At the office, the two men hashed out the rules of psychohistory, and Asimov returned the following month with the 
> first story of the series, which was published in the May 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. The details of 
> psychohistory were vague, but Asimov left no doubt about its effectiveness: “A great psychologist such as Seldon 
> could unravel human emotions and human reactions sufficiently to be able to predict broadly the historical sweep of 
> the future.” As Hitler rewrote the map of Europe, Asimov’s story implied that such events could be foreseen, even 
> altered before they occurred, and the idea resonated with readers who were justifiably afraid of what the future 
> might bring.
>
> Asimov later acknowledged that psychohistory amounted to a kind of emotional reassurance: “Hitler kept winning 
> victories, and the only way that I could possibly find life bearable at the time was to convince myself that no 
> matter what he did, he was doomed to defeat in the end.” The notion was framed as a science that could predict events 
> centuries in advance, but it was driven by a desire to know what would happen in the war over the next few months — a 
> form of wishful thinking that is all but inevitable at times of profound uncertainty. Before the last presidential 
> election, this impulse manifested itself in a widespread obsession with poll numbers and data journalism, as captured 
> by a headline in Wired: “I Just Want Nate Silver to Tell Me It’s All Going to Be Fine.”
>
> [snip]
>
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