Isaac Asimov, Karl Marx & the Hari Seldon Paradox

Let's try looking back at the Foundation universe... which some of you have read... considering Isaac Asimov's sci fi classic in light of his acknowledged influences - Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith and Karl Marx... which I would venture almost none of you have read.  Indeed, I am less well-read in those three than I ought to be, though I am very well-read in Asimov!  And hence, let me attempt to do my main job... 

...to be interesting. To offer perspectives you may find nowhere else.

== Isaac Asimov knew them all! ==

Fans of Asimov’s Foundation series often cite Isaac being inspired by Gibbon’s classic, The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, and of course that is apt…

... though in Foundation’s Triumph I point out that Asimov’s future Galactic Empire based on Planet Trantor has many traits that are more Chinese than Roman. Especially the way it is run by an all-powerful caste of eunuchs. (The robots obedient to Daneel Olivaw, who are sterile and loyal, but relentlessly manipulative, behind the scenes.)

But another inspiration deeply affected Asimov. Anyone doing historical musings in the first half of the 20th Century – and well into the second half – was deeply affected by the historiographic  incantations and predictions of Karl Marx. Indeed, he was so widely read and so influential that notions of inevitable effects of technology on class struggle profoundly influenced Ayn Rand, for example!

Indeed, Rand's fervid hatred of communism (from her upbringing in Soviet Russia) was that of an acolyte-heretic, spitefully rejecting but staying very close to the teacher. Her entire eschatology was Marxist to its core, only omitting the master's final phases! Cribbing liberally till near the end, Rand chose to freeze her own scenario at the moment of utter domination by capitalist lords, wrote-off any proletarian revolutionary response, and called that outcome good. (See my decryption of Ayn Rand.) 

In Asimov’s case, the reflex was not to create a quasi-religious scripture, but rather to envision the crude Marxian methods being developed into a vastly intricate and fact-grounded science. A science called psychohistory. 

Of course, Isaac had a scientist's habit of questioning all models, even his own! And this led, decade after decade, to Isaac arguing with his former self! Discovering flaws and innovating possible solutions, a process that I describe in greater detail here… in a grand, galactic thought experiment that I completed (I think), bringing everything full circle in Foundation’s Triumph.

== Applying this to today ==

So what does any of this have to do with the politics of here and now? Both the confident prediction-incantations of Marx and the whole notion of psychohistory appear… well… kinda quaint to modern minds. Allowing us to shrug-off and even forget how compelling both were to both the masses and all wings of intelligentsia, a couple of generations back.

Well, there’s no room here for detail. Though there's plenty to discuss! (See "Class War and the Lessons of History.") ... Like how old Karl and his followers mapped out as ‘inevitable’ a series of events in oppression of an increasingly skilled working class whose resentment of owner-oppression could only follow one, ordained path.

Alas, having transformed himself over time (as Freud did) from brilliant researcher into a tendentious guru surrounded by acolytes, Marx came to believe incantations could overcome inconvenient human nature. It never seemed to occur to him that hundreds of thousands would actually read his books!  And find them convincing. Convincing enough to decide to alter the apparently ordained path! Changing course through incremental, rather than sudden, reform.

Above all, Karl Marx never imagined that scions of wealth – Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his circle - would be persuaded to buy off the workers, by leveling the field and inviting them to share in a strong Middle Class, whose children would then (as recommended by Adam Smith) be able to compete fairly with scions of the rich. 

It was a stunning (if way-incomplete) act of intelligence and resilience that changed America's path and thus the world's.

Among many mistakes, neglecting to consider that possibility was Old Karl's (and Lenin's etc.) biggest. Assuming that humanity is stupid and predictable is almost as dumb a glaring error as assuming that we’re smart! 

Anyway, the Rooseveltean Experiment worked, far better than even its believers and enactors expected. For decades the US labor movement was hugely effective at counterbalancing the lords of wealth. Disparities hit levels lower than any great nation across history. And marginalized groups - races and genders - overcame resistance to enter the bargain. For a while, Marx seemed consigned to the dustbin...

Only now his tomes are again flying off the shelves, at almost every university on the planet. Why?

== He's baaaaack! ==

Why? Because our insipid world aristocracy is largely made up of buffoons and doomsday 'preppers' and inheritance brats whose addiction to flatterers has left them unable to read, let alone argue over the historical lessons of class taught by 6000 years of history. Or especially by the innovations of the Greatest Generation.

Show me one of today's oligarchs with the brains of that smart crook, Joseph Kennedy, who supported FDR for one reason:

"I'd rather be taxed half my wealth so the poor and workers are calm and happy than lose it all to revolution."

Any aristocrat who actually, actually thinks the R word is not on the table, amid his caste's all out war against not just labor but increasingly fed-up nerd professions, is truly too smug, too dumb and incurious ever to know or care what the word 'tumbrel' means, until he is riding in one. But it's a cart that can find its way even into deep, Patagonian prepper fortresses.

== So, is it a cycle? ==

A some of you know, I have a deep and abiding dislike toward yammers about so-called "cycles of history" like the insipid, recent Fourth Turning fetish that's so beloved on the lobotomized U.S. right. (That's okay, the mad left, while much smaller, has its own insipidities.)

What ... all cycles, Brin? Even one that is… predictable? Well, I will quickly grant that there are strong attractor states, the worst and strongest being feudal or monarchal pyramids of privilege, ownership and power that dominated 99% of human societies for at least 6000 years. A natural - if toxic - outgrowth from mammalian male reproductive strategies that have only ever been stymied in a few Enlightenment Experiments. Like ours.

And yes, as the younger (smarter) Karl Marx pointed out, capitalism can either follow the recommendations of Adam Smith and remain flat-fair-transparent-competitive-creative, or else... it will follow the far more familiar path of parasitism by cheaters... and decay back into a form of feudalism, yet again.

One of you (Paradoctor) put this ironic contradiction cogently, in light of the Rooseveltean Miracle that kept capitalism flat-fair, for a while... 

“When the capitalist class takes seriously Marx's predictions of mass immiseration and political unrest, then they enact mixed-economy reforms to ensure the stability of the middle class, as insurance. The reforms work; while inconvenient to their exercise of lordly whim, they protect the owner families from revolution and Marx's predictions are falsified."

Paradoctor brought it back around to Isaac Asimov's grand thought experiment. 

“This is an instance of Seldon's Paradox: that accurate psychohistorical predictions, once made known, set into effect psychohistorical forces that falsify the prediction. 

"But the Paradox has more work to do. When Marx's predictions fail, then the capitalist class stops taking those predictions seriously. Therefore they stop supporting opportunity-uplifting semi-socialism and a flattened-fair social order, turning back to cheating to benefit their own inheritance brats. The reforms unravel, resulting in mass immiseration and political unrest, as Marx predicted."

In other words, what we are seeing now... a massive, worldwide oligarchic putsch to discredit the very same Rooseveltean social compact that saved their caste and allowed them to become rich... but that led to them surrounding themselves with sycophants who murmur flatteringnotions of inherent superiority and dreams of harems. Would-be lords, never allowing themselves to realize that yacht has sailed. 

“So to the capitalist class, Marx is as true a prophet as he is a false prophet. Likewise for the Seldonian psychohistorian: when first stated, the prediction sets into motion forces that deny it; yet when the prediction is denied, the forces against it abate, and it comes true. Therefore to the society, the psychohistorical prediction is as confirmed as it is denied.”

What we're seeing, alas, is final proof that Adam Smith was right, as were the U.S. Founders who rebelled against dullard inheritance feudalism... as were subsequent reformers who had to ratchet forward those incomplete reforms, one grindingly too-slow step at a time.

We can and should(!) argue over the details! And the Seldon/Marx paradox will likely be with us for a long time... and even longer under AI-eunuch lords? 

But the central conundrum remains: that rule by narrow aristocracies was always deeply stoopid across all of human history, a litany of bad governance, delusions and horrors that was only finally broken by the Enlightenment Attractor Alternative. An alternative that perhaps - across the galaxy - only humanity ever stumbled into... which may rank as a top explanation for the Fermi Paradox

The conundrum has a basic answer.  Our path out of the age-old macho, feudal trap was (primitively) shown by the social contract generated by the Greatest Generation and the equalizing/elevating power of the GI Bill and civil rights and the drive to argue new reforms openly and fairly.

And hence, when you see would-be lords dissing that process, you must recognize the old, reflexively unsapient enemy of all our ancestors, all descendants, all sagacity... and all hope.

Inventing Hari Seldon's psychohistory - and other science marvels

The Defense Department wants new computer tools to analyze mounds of unstructured text, blogs and tweets as part of a coordinated push to help military analysts predict the future and make decisions faster. The search is part of the Office of Naval Research's "Data to Decisions" program, a series of three-to-10-year initiatives that will address the volume of information that threatens to overwhelm planners in the digital age. The ONR is calling for computer algorithms to predict events, fuse different forms of information and offer context on unfolding events. The office expects to spend $500,000 each year in funding.

This is just one of many such endeavors currently underway, the most ambitious being a European Union plan devoting billions of Euros to developing predictive analytics that sound a lot like the "psychohistory" of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Universe and its genius prognosticator Hari Seldon.  (I know about such things: I entered Seldon's mind, in my novel set in Isaac's cosmos in my novel, FOUNDATION'S TRIUMPH that tied up many loose ends in the Foundation universe.)

Alas, while better tools for appraisal and projection are desperately needed (I portray them in EXISTENCE), I also consider all these expensive European and American efforts to be premature and likely doomed.  

Instead, what would be far better is to lay the foundations by doing one simple thing -- performing a broad-spectrum survey in order to find out who - in human civilization - happens to be right a lot.

Can you believe that there has never been a systematic effort to do that one, simple thing?  Shine light on all the actuaries, horseracing touts, stock analysts, political pundits and so on who claim to have a handle on the future, with a clear and do-able aim - to appraise and score them, so that we can find out - at long last - who gets it right more often than others... perhaps anomalously often, far above chance? And in contrast, who is full of bull? Can you think of any appraisal... any at all... that could have more substantial positive effects on society and the world?  Or that would seem more terrifying to the "chattering castes"?

And so why do I push for it?  Guesses, anyone?

I discuss elsewhere the many advantages. As well as complications, e.g. that the very best prognosticators might not want scrutiny applied to their methods. Still, we'd all have a chance for a better society if the best were scored and revealed and their methods scrutinized. It would also cost 1% of the vast (and futile) modeling programs under proposal. Ah, but perhaps that is why my suggestion is never taken seriously.  See: Accountability for Everyday Prophets: A Call for a Predictions Registry. 

== How to keep growth going... ==

Is growth slowing?  Every decade since the 1940s featured some cluster of new technologies -- from jets to satellites to pharma and the internet -- that created a burst of new wealth and productivity. (Which incidentally helped Americans to pay for the tsunami of purchases that then propelled world development.) I've pointed out that most U.S. problems are rooted in one sad fact: there was no such "big new thing" in the 1st decade of the 21st Century.

That's partly the fault of troglodyte political leaders who ruled us then. But in a broader sense it provokes some to claim that the era of tech driven growth is over,  Paul Krugman replies in the NY Times that it's too soon to count technology out.  Still, even optimists should be concerned: while smart machines may make higher GDP possible, “they also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.”

So, is the "maker movement" going to rescue American manufacturing independence... and civilization in general... as some  tech-utopians not predict? (And as I depict in my graphic novel TINKERERS.)  Have a look at a very thoughtful essay in Technology Review that considers some factors that the tech-transcendentalists - in their zeal to believe - may have missed.

Fortunately, the paucity of great economy-driving inventions dows not apply to pure science. A list of scientific and technical accomplishments made in 2012 suggests that our time of wonders is not behind us, but ahead.  Giving vision to the blind, discovering rogue planets or others made of diamond ... or orbiting the nearest star. Hacking the brain.  Photographing DNA. Invisibility cloaks and more...

== Saving the World... with self-driving cars? ==

Climate change increases the risk of many types of record-breaking extreme weather events that threaten communities across the country. In 2012, there were 3,527 monthly weather records broken for heat, rain, and snow in the US, according to information from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). That's even more than the 3,251 records smashed in 2011—and some of the newly-broken records had stood for 30 years or more.  More ammo for your idiot uncle to frantically dodge and deflect.

Okay, so what do cars have to do with solving this? Recall a couple of postings ago I described my own small role in the Clean Air Car Race of 1970, which might have hastened the removal of lead from gasoline. Now comes the endeavor of another Brin... Google's self-driving car, which may offer not only convenience, but a decline in the need for personally-owned automobiles, overall.  A problem for Detroit, but a boon to urban centers, if you can share a car with a dozen others and use your phone to summon it to come get you, whenever you need a ride.  Or join a coop or a flash-rental agency to get the same thing.  Or unleash your own car at night to roam around as a taxi, earning you bread?

== Science Potpourri ==

Kaggle attempts to use crowd-sourcing and contests/prizes to help small companies solve knotty software problems quickly. Companies pay to post their competitions to Kaggle. But those fees will be waived for the five startups Kaggle selects to take part in its new experiment in crowdsourced algorithms.

The bizarre notion of "negative temperatures"  seems weird and quasi-mystical... though those claiming to have achieved it do not define temperature the way most of us do, as a property of atomic motion, but rather as a thermodynamic quality. From my understanding of what they are doing, it sounds rather like the inverted energy-state system you get inside a laser, plus some mumbo terminology... plus a trick of creating atoms that each have a "maximum energy state"... then causing the number of occupied high energy states to outnumber the low energy ones.  When all of the system's energy is crammed into those maximum energy states, the entropy of the system actually falls. That is, by strict, statistical definition.

See also this take on it. What the article doesn't explain is how the authors blocked  the system from simply adding higher states as happens in regular physics, all the way to ionized plasma. The researchers achieved this at nano-temperatures near absolute zero, which suggests taking advantage of some quantum-level barrier that can only be used in such extremely cold ranges.  Hence all the talk of "practical uses" seems, well, far fetched. In that light, "negative temperature" is a thermodynamics legalism. In fact, well, I feel frosty toward it.

Meanwhile... Australian Zircons have long been considered the oldest tracers of geology on Earth.  But this one apparently formed when the planet was just 150 million years old. In there are more surprises...tales of the new born earth.

== Bio Miscellany! ==

We are definitely entering the era of "augmented soldiers" that I forecast in The Postman. Studies are underway, how the Pentagon and others might negotiate the minefield of risks and opportunities ahead.

A "micromort" is a unit of statistical chance of increasing your likelihood of dying by one millionth (or decreasing it.)  An interesting approach to risk assessment.

A new device about the size of a business card could allow health care providers to test for insulin and other blood proteins, cholesterol, and even signs of viral or bacterial infection all at the same time — with one drop of blood.

On 23 occasions over the past several years, wild dolphins were observed giving gifts to humans at the Tangalooma Island Resort in Australia. The gifts included eels, tuna, squid, an octopus and an assortment of many other types of different fin fish.

And while we're at sea... Japanese researchers post first video of a giant squid in its natural habitat.

Release the kraken! A collection of tales and legends, poems and fiction, from Verne to Tennyson -- about this marvelous cephalopod.

The detailed changes in the structure of a virus as it infects an E. coli bacterium have been observed for the first time. 

Instructing scar tissue to change itself into healthy tissue. By using a cocktail of three specific genes researchers have used gene therapy to reprogram the scar tissue cells on a damaged heart into functional muscle cells, while the addition of a fourth gene stimulated the growth of blood vessels to enhance the effect.

The doctor's office of the future: a kiosk at your local grocery store?

 == And Technology on parade ==

Russia sets its sights on the moon: Four robot probes due for 2015, a manned mission by 2030. The first flight, slated for 2015, will see a 1.2 ton lunar lander called Luna-Glob (Moon Globe) deposited on the moon's surface to search for water, take soil samples, and beam back its findings to Earth. I wish Phobos-Grunt had succeeded... Phobos is valuable. Not so sure about the rest of this.

A Topological Recipe Book for New Materials. Researchers showed that they can create a recipe book to build new materials using the mathematics of topology (whose properties that do not change when an object is continuously deformed.)

I've always been a junkie for bridges.  I love every variety and find them the most esthetically wonderful things we humans make, blending art and nature's laws.  Now see how smart design and super materials are enabling ever longer cable-stay bridges.

Researchers used electricity on certain regions in the brain of a patient with chronic, severe facial pain to release an opiate-like substance that’s considered one of the body’s most powerful painkillers.

Construction is complete on behemoth airship; first flight planned. Worldwide Aeros, a company of about 100 employees, built the prototype under a contract of about $35 million from the Pentagon and NASA. The Aeroscraft is a zeppelin with a 230-foot rigid skeleton made of aluminum and carbon fiber. It's a new type of hybrid aircraft that combines airplane and airship technologies.

North Dakota is now brighter than Pennsylvania, as seen from space. Why? The fracking boom has so many oil rigs at work, flaring off excess natural gas under super-lax state rules, that ND glows like New York. Ah, yummy greenhouse. This needs adjustment. And soon.

UCSD has introduced Diego-san, a new humanoid robot who mimics the expressions of a one-year-old child. Diego-san’s hardware was developed by two leading robot manufacturers: the head by Hanson Robotics and the body by Japan’s Kokoro Co. The project is led by University of California, San Diego research scientist Javier Movellan, who directs the Institute for Neural Computation’s Machine Perception Laboratory. Well into the Uncanny Valley...

Read an update on the Google Glass Project, which promises to deliver heads-up, augmented reality (AR) to smart glasses you'll wear on the street... supposedly in 2014.  And to see where all this will lead?  Have a look at your future in Vinge's  RAINBOW'S END or (even more accurately) my EXISTENCE.

Challenging literature is good for the brain? Better than self-help books. Maybe even try some challenging Science Fiction titles....

Nanowire Arrays for Better Piezoelectric Energy Generators. Researchers developed a nanogenerator consisting of an array of vertically aligned nanowires that, when deformed by an impact or twist induces a piezoelectric production of electrons. The proof-of-concept work included producing enough energy to turn on an LED light..

And finally...  Ever had one of those chilling "coincidence" moments when Some set of flukes coincide?  "What're the odds of THAT happening?"  Are you familiar with The Odds Must Be Crazy website?  They collect these kinds of coincidences and attempt to de-mystify them with science and statistics.

David Brin

http://www.davidbrin.com

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