Justin B Rye 01-Aug-08
Clarke	Retro-Futurology	Heinlein

ISAAC ASIMOV

Peer Review

My retro-futurological anthology would seem incomplete if it didn't feature Isaac Asimov alongside his fellow Hugo-hoggers - after all, he had plenty to say on this topic, as usual.  As well as science fiction stories (such as Nightfall and The Caves of Steel) and a doctoral dissertation (Kinetics of the Reaction Inactivation of Tyrosinase During Its Catalysis of the Aerobic Oxidation of Catechol) Asimov produced hundreds of books covering almost every other category in the Dewey classification system, plus thousands of magazine articles.  His regular columns in "The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction" often featured social and technological prognostication, and the October 1974 issue of F&SF featured an article entitled O Keen-Eyed Peerer into the Future! in which the Good Doctor itemised the following "Three Laws of Futurics":

1. What is happening will continue to happen.
2. Consider the obvious seriously, for few people will see it.
3. Consider the consequences.

Unfortunately, that's about as quotable as he gets.  Where Clarke's Laws can be seen as guidelines for writing and interpreting science journalism, Asimov's are essentially a sort of general-purpose social science data extrapolation how-to.  And I don't think much of the word "futurics" either, though I suppose it's less ambiguous than "futurism" (let's leave that to mean Benito Mussolini's favourite art style).  I'm awarding a score of five for technical merit and two for artistic impression, but with a one-point penalty for not showing his working.

I, II, III, Robot

Isaac's more famous newtoniad (and his more successful coinage ending in "-ics") is of course his "Three Laws of Robotics":

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

This list, just like Clarke's, was first formulated in summary form by his editor; and just like Clarke's it eventually ended up gaining an extra entry, though in this case as a "Zeroth Law" prohibiting harm to humanity in general - compare the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics.

However, these laws were never intended as a prediction of how AIs will be programmed, but simply as a narrative mechanism for generating the kinds of non-Frankensteinian plotlines he was interested in writing.  We might someday get robots with vaguely Asimovian hard-wired systems of ethics... but if so, it'll be because the manufacturers were Asimov fans.  If instead it turns out that the first AIs are built by the military with an entirely different set of priorities, that's not something Isaac Asimov loses points to Mary Shelley for.

("Frankenstein", by the way, was subtitled "or, The Modern Prometheus"... see mythology note.)

Foundation, Spam, Robots, Empire and Spam

Then again, if Asimov didn't expect these "positronic" robots in real life, that also makes it strange that he should nevertheless have ended up introducing them into his other well-known SF future history: the originally robotless Foundation series.  These deserve a mention here since their central science-fictional element is itself futurology - but not the modest, fuzzy kind Asimov was to codify as "futurics".  Instead it was the kind that lets you map out a thousand-year secret plan for the re-establishment of civilisation after the fall of the Galactic Empire.

The classic Foundation trilogy kept the inventor of the science of "psychohistory" a shadowy figure (not difficult given that Hari Seldon was long dead by a few dozen pages in), but his allegedly infallible mathematical equations dominated the story.  Their predictive power was always justified in terms of the analogy with gas dynamics: the movements of individual molecules are unpredictable, but the behaviour of large volumes of gas is subject to statistical laws.  Unfortunately, even granting the assumption that sociopolitical processes can be modelled as a deterministic system, it turns out that this isn't enough to make it predictable - turbulent flow in gases can be thoroughly chaotic.  The dynamics of a chaotic system is sensitive to infinitesimally trivial features of its initial conditions (as well as the algorithms you're using to model it), so the effective range of detailed forecasts is inherently limited.

When Chaos Theory (and the "Butterfly Effect") hit the pop-science headlines in the eighties, I wasn't surprised to see Asimov returning to the Foundation series; but instead of addressing this issue in the sequels, he just muddied things up with a couple of extra vast cosmic conspiracies, in the process throwing three-laws robots (and one particular celebrity robot) into the same fictional universe.  That's evidence either of a desperately short supply of other ideas or of an increasing tendency to take the existence of robots for granted as a necessary feature of any plausible future.  And if Asimov was himself guilty of confusing his fiction with futurology, maybe I should wait for the galactic Dark Age and base his score on the time it takes for civilisation to recover.