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June 25, 2020 - 7:00am
This really is a golden age of TV drama. As if Amazon’s Lord of the Rings prequel (reported budget: $1 billion) wasn’t’t enough, we’re also getting an Apple TV adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels.
We’ll have to wait until next year to see it, but a trailer was released this week.
The story is set in the far future. A vast and ancient empire spans the galaxy. It looks set to last forever, but is in fact slowly falling apart. Asimov’s hero, Hari Seldon, realises that collapse is inevitable — but that the ensuing dark age can be greatly shortened if humanity’s knowledge is preserved to hasten the process of recovery.
From A Canticle for Leibowitz to Star Wars, the fall and rebirth of civilisations is a familiar theme in science fiction. What makes the Foundation story special is the means by which the protagonist knows what is going to happen. Seldon is both a scientist and a historian because in Asimov’s tale history is a science. It goes by the name of ‘psychohistory’ because it aggregates observations of individual human behaviour to produce predictions as to how the future of large groups of people — including an entire galactic empire — will unfold. So developed is this science that history can be written out and modelled in the form of mathematical equations.
This doesn’t imply that there’s no such thing as freewill — just that millions of unpredictable decisions at the level of the individual average out to produce trends at a macro level that can be predicted. This is pretty much what the real world discipline of economics assumes — though, of course, it doesn’t attempt to model the whole of history or make predictions very far into the future.
In the 20th century, the Marxist and Fascist ideologues who thought that they could see the shape of things to come, came unstuck. Even the ‘Whig view of history’ — which is only fuzzily predictive — has been discredited. And yet the dream of a science of history retains its allure.
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SubscribeI seem to remember that the Mule, was a black swan event that ruined Hari Seldon’s calculations.
Indeed – and when Asimov returned to the Foundation with a new set of books several years later, it was revealed that ‘psychohistory ‘ was secondary to some sort of wishy-washy ‘Gaia’ theory
I read Foundation and its follow up during the lonely winter of 1985/86 so I don’t remember much about it. But this line from the article strikes me:
‘It goes by the name of ‘psychohistory’ because it aggregates observations of individual human behaviour to produce predictions as to how the future of large groups of people ” including an entire galactic empire ” will unfold.’
For about 20 years I have been observing individual – and collective – behaviours in the West which suggest that something is very wrong. If this ‘psychohistory’ applies, these behaviours may indeed be lndeed be leading to the collapse of which signs can currently be seen in the US.
Interesting. Would you care to outline a small handful of these behaviours? I wonder if you’d have made the same observation the 1980?
Asimov was a brilliant conceptualiser, but not the first to think of the idea. Long ago I wasted a great deal of energy reading War And Peace only to find the interesting bit (to a mad physicist) was the brief Second Epilogue, essentially Tolstoy’s theory of psychohistory. If you could go back and kill, say, Napoleon or Hitler in their cradle, would it change history dramatically – or would inevitable forces just draw someone very similar to take their place?
I now think this cannot be true, because of the butterfly effect and chaos. For example the history of both West and East was majorly changed because invasion fleets were sunk by storms which blew up suddenly. If a butterfly had gone flip instead of flap a few weeks earlier, that would surely have changed history non-trivially.
The image of Hari Seldon is, oddly, uncredited. It is by Michael Whelan, a living artist, and presumably the site owners have paid him a suitable licence fee to use his work? It would nice for him to receive some credit, too.
I’m also a long-time fan of Asimov and the Foundation series. So, thanks for the great article and concluding comment. It seems that we can predict the future”¦ but only a little bit. It is our human imagination and knowledge that helps us to do that, and our human limitations that believe we can be successful (how many gamblers believe that their next bet will hit
the jackpot). My own field of research is in understanding and accelerating the development of useful knowledge. We can see some improvement in the social sciences but it is slow. Very slow. At the risk of making a prediction, our current trends suggest that social sciences like psychology and policy will require hundreds of years of development before they become highly effective.
So, as with Asimov’s collapse of the galactic empire, we could say that we are currently living in the “dark ages.” There is hope, however. Using new tools to accelerate the development of our knowledge, we can shorten the length of time we spend in these dark ages from centuries to decades. http://ssrc.ie/blog/2020/04…
I was an avid reader of science fiction in my teens and twenties, (1960’s and 1970’s). I don’t remember much about it, but Heinlein and Asimov were my favorites. A number of years ago I picked up one of Heinlein’s books; and in my maturity, I was put off by the intellectual arrogance. The following poem by Rudyard Kipling is, I think, a more useful view of history.
In the old days, students learned to write by copying essays into their copy books. In Kiplings’s poem, the word “Gods “is meant to represent secular truths, not religious ones.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.
When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”
On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter
return.
“For instance, corporations that once herded their workers together in open plan offices in expensive cities are now discovering that the knowledge economy doesn’t in fact collapse if people work from home.”
Something Alvin Toffler predicted forty years ago in “The Third Wave”. But sometimes (often?) we need to be reminded of the obvious. The long-predicted age of the Electronic Cottage may indeed be upon us, and I believe that is overall a very good thing.
First of chill out. It’s just a book, a work of fiction. Second, psychohistory, as per the book, can only predict future of a civilisation if the individuals in that civilisation are not aware of what the prediction is, otherwise the whole model falls apart as it is not able to predict with any certainty individual behaviours. So…. It’s got nothing to do with the “the Marxist and Fascist ideologues who thought that they could see the shape of things to come”.
I am rereading the Foundation books and the robot stories that culminated in mankind populating the Galaxy in vast numbers in the second wave.
Seldon’s psychohistory fascinates me. It is an expansion of observing the herd mentality and predicting thexway many humans will act under certain conditions.
For example, at the beginning of the present Covid-19 pandemic, it could be accurately predicted that there would be mass panic buying.
As the lockdown eases in the UK and other countries, we face another “sheep mentality” event; mass gatherings in places of beauty or interest, pubs and clubs etc.
Humankind as a species is generally a sociable animal and this aspect of our character can be used to predict our actions on mass in many cases.
The use of mathematics, historical precedent and psychology to predict the future of our species, is likely already happening.
You do know it’s fiction, right?
Asimov’s idea of psychohistory arose from his understanding of the kinetic theory of gases , which lead to simple equations enabling us to predict changes in volume, pressure and temperature. However this statistical analysis can only work because of the vast numbers of molecules involved.
Twenty odd litres of a gas contain
6×10^23 molecules(Avagadro’s number). This is a huge number roughly equal to the number of stars in the known universe. Hari Seldon’s predictions about the future of the Galactic Empire rely on there being these vast numbers of humans . That’s what makes it such a wonderful piece of s.f.
Purely incidentally, Colin Kapp’s The Patterns of Chaos had, if not a particularly similar theme, a similar setting and plot devices which mirrored Asimov’s (Chaos theory predicting events to the second and millimetre across intergalactically geological spans of time). If I wuz a producer, I’d have picked that book; lots of immense violence as well as personal conflict.
Not having read the book I presume Asimov factored in human growth trajectories and resource constraints, i.e the ecological dimension of survivability.
Within this context, interspecific interactions (competition, cooperation etc) can be modelled in which through network analysis also incorporates ‘historical baggage’.
https://www.stockholmresili…
Now that predictability has been enhanced, we can look at other aspects of ecological science including resilience theory and determine, through systems analysis, we can start to predict whether constructed systems are resilient are not.
https://www.stockholmresili…
However, predictions are always subject to change depending on whether resilience thinking is applied or not.
https://www.stockholmresili…
This of course also depends on whether the system is open or closed. If closed, then the principle of minimum power would need to be incorporated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/…
If the system is open then the maximum power principle would need to be incorporated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/…
Overall, I presume in the Foundation, resilience thinking was rejected in favour of the maximum power principle.
It’s fiction. It requires faster than light travel. If one can swallow that, why over analyze the rest. Just enjoy the story.