Why Asimov’s Foundation series still resonates in the AI era (Chow Chung-yan, 26 Aug 2026, SCMP)
Elon Musk called it a fundamental catalyst for SpaceX. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman credited it with shaping his career. Newt Gingrich made it required reading for his congressional staff, and even Japanese cult leader Shoko Asahara was reportedly inspired by it. […]When Asimov began writing Foundation 85 years ago, he was capturing the cutting-edge intellectual currents of his era: mathematical determinism, the quantification of social sciences and the rise of central planning in governance.
Economists such as John Maynard Keynes argued that macro-level human behaviour could be managed through top-down intervention, while Jan Tinbergen and Ragnar Frisch were building the first econometric models. Seldon’s psychohistory was essentially macroeconomics and public administration pushed to their absolute logical extreme – individual chaos smoothed out by the predictable behaviour of billions.
Both sides of this coin are incredibly destructive: there are the intellectuals who believe that their social engineering would, uniquely, work and those who think their failed lives must have been engineered from without.