Positive Liberty

I want to get a tattoo of myself on my entire body, only 2″ taller. — Steven Wright

I found Isaac Asimov’s Foundation a lot less enjoyable the second time through. I’d read it I believe in 8th or 9th grade, and it was really a disappointment to come back to it. Oh well, you live and learn.

First, the plots of each of the sub-stories of this book are almost absurdly contrived. What seemed well-constructed before now seems tired and predictable. This may owe to Asimov’s great influence on later fiction, science and otherwise — Can later works ruin earlier ones? — but I still had a hard time getting hooked by them the second time around.

Second, the whole thing could have used an editor. On one page, a technological thingamajig is called a “hyperwave,” which we’ll give a pass, for the sake of argument. Science fiction gets its poetic license, and we especially extend the license to golden-age science fiction. But only a few pages later, the very same device is called an “ultrawave,” which is hard to forgive. Internal consistency and all that. Also: Is the name Anselm haut Rodric, or Anselm [H]aut Rodric? True, he’s a minor character, but the “haut” is noted, in authorial voice, as a particle of nobility, and dwelled upon as a bit of local color, so one would expect consistency here of all places.

But then, these aren’t the reasons I’m writing.

I’m writing about the numbers! The numbers. Not only is there a scientific means of predicting the future, but it can be performed on a pocket calculator:

Seldon removed his calculator pad from the pouch at his belt. Men said he kept one beneath his pillow for use in moments of wakefulness. Its gray, glossy finish was slightly worn by use. Seldon’s nimble fingers, spotted now with age, played along the files and rows of buttons that filled its surface. Red symbols glowed out from the upper tier.

He said, “That represents the condition of the Empire at present.”

After some technobabble,

“This is Trantor three centuries from now. How do you interpret that? Eh?” He put his head to one side and waited.

Gall said, unbelievingly, “Total destruction! But — but that is impossible. . . .”

The real science fiction of the Foundation series is not the hyperwave or ultrawave or whatever it was. It’s not even the pocket calculator, whose existence the above excerpt accurately predicted years before the real thing. The key science fiction development of the Foundation series is in the social sciences: Asimov’s “psychohistory” is nothing less than the ability to predict the future of a sufficiently large civilization. (We’re told throughout this novel and the rest of the series that psychohistory won’t work on small groups, only on large ones.)

It’s an extraordinary technology: What would be required to produce it? Let’s set aside the computational resources for a moment, although these are obvious and would have to be vast. Let’s also keep out of the technobabble, which I am sure could be supplied by appropriately trained mathematicians. Or authors.

To be able to predict the future without constructing an exact replica of the entire universe would require a process of modeling or abstraction that in some way simplified matters. It would have to focus solely on the important things, and those important things would have to be fewer, or at least easier to calculate, than the set of data that is the universe, actual and entire.

Just as when modeling the arc of a thrown baseball we need not worry about the ball’s color, but only about its mass, air resistance, volume, and a few other essential traits, a workable psychohistory would have to identify the essential characteristics of human actions (with, according to Asimov, the stipulation that individual actions matter less and less as the sample size increases, which is a lot to concede in itself, but never mind). To get at the essential characteristics of human actions, we would need to know what humans value, and how much they value it. We would presumably also have to know how these evaluations changed in importance in large groups with conflicting values.

In other words, we would be thrown right into the middle of the socialist calculation debate. Surprisingly, Asimov — a refugee from the Soviet Union — came down squarely on the side of the socialists, at least in his fictional society. The economy, and also the politics and culture, can be predicted, even planned in advance, using advanced mathematics, and once the heavy lifting is done, the results can be demonstrated on a pocket calculator.

One thing that’s always puzzled me about the socialist calculation debate is that not only would we have to solve a prohibitively large number of equations to find equilibrium prices for every single good in an economy where the prices of all goods depend to some degree on those of all others, we would also have to gather knowledge from every market actor about their individual hierarchy of preferences. In Asimov’s much more ambitious project, we would also have to derive and solve entirely new types of equations in which emotional states and ideologies are somehow quantified and placed into relationships with one another.

Often, however, I don’t even personally know what I want — and I haven’t the slightest idea what I might want a year from now. These wants of a year from now must surely be important in predicting the future two years hence, and even if individual preferences did cancel one another out, the same situation clearly obtains for larger groups: Humanity as a whole can’t be imagined to know what it will want a year from now, if none of its parts can do so.

In other words, to predict the future, we must be able to predict the future, and we’re back at square one. To predict even the immediate future, we must have access to the wants and needs of all people, or at least a sufficiently large subset of them, and people themselves typically don’t know all of what they want and need, and what degree of importance they would give to these desires. Psychohistory might be the one thing even more impossible than traveling faster than the speed of light. (Asimov’s characters do this all the time; tellingly, only an elite few can fathom psychohistory.)

It does say something, though, about the power of an idea, that this sort of extensive social prediction was seen simply as the logical extrapolation of current progress then underway in the social sciences: Just as social scientists were then learning to quantify and offer predictions about, say, government spending and the business cycle, eventually all of these things would be made plain, and they could be represented simply and straightforwardly in numbers. On a pocket calculator, perhaps.

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