Foundation

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Introduction

Foundation is a science fiction series written by Isaac Asimov in 1951. In Japanese translation, it is titled “Foundation: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire” and is published by Hayakawa Shobo.

It has also been made into a TV series by apple TV, which is scheduled to be released in September 2021, and is a science fiction series that has been getting a lot of attention in recent years.

Isaac Asimov.

Isaac Asimov (January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American author and biochemist (professor at Boston University) who wrote over 500 books. He is best known for his science fiction, popular science commentaries, and mystery novels, although his topics include science, language, history, and the Bible.

He has won seven Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards, and four Locus Awards in the field of science fiction.

Asimov’s works include the Robot Series, known as “The Three Robot Principles,” which explores the relationship between humans and robots, and the Foundation Series, among other major works. He addressed and showed deep insight into essential human issues, such as the impact of technological evolution on human society and the relationship between science and ethics. His work is highly regarded not only as science fiction but also as general literature, and his influence extends beyond contemporary science fiction writers to technology, philosophy, and culture.

Foundation – The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire

Asimov’s classic science fiction series, the Foundation series, inspired by Edward Gibbon’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” tells the story of the collapse and rebirth of a vast galactic empire in a future universe. It was published in the form of short stories until 1949, when it was collected into a trilogy.

The story begins with a scientist who predicts that the decline of the Galactic Empire will lead to a dark age that will last for tens of thousands of years, and that humanity will be tormented by strife and poverty for a long time. After his death, the empire collapses as he predicted, and the mechanism he set in motion begins to manifest itself and order begins to be restored little by little, but when it begins to be hindered by unforeseen factors, this is a full-length science fiction book (six volumes in the original) that describes how the people who followed responded.

Although it was written more than 60 years ago, it is still a very enjoyable read. The technology that forms the basis of the story is similar to that of today’s latest technology in many ways, showing Asimov’s foresight.

For example, the Empire’s energy technology is based on the use of miniaturized and generalized nuclear power, which is the same micro nuclear reactor technology I mentioned earlier that is now becoming a reality.

Also, the key technology in the story that predicts the decline of the Galactic Empire will be something called “psychohistory”. This is a mathematical method for predicting the behavior of vast numbers of human groups, and by finding certain rules in human emotions and reactions to social and economic stimuli, it is set to be able to predict the behavior of humanity in the future.

As for this technology, Asimov took a hint from the gas molecular kinetics theory, which says that the motion of individual molecules cannot be predicted, but the average motion of a group of gases can be calculated, replacing molecules with humans and gases with groups of humans. In terms of the current technological approach, this would be Boltzmann-Syn as described in “Where do features come from? It is also close to algorithms such as graph neural networks, which are also close to the principles of BERT, which has become very popular in recent years.

There are still technical hurdles that need to be overcome in order to realize ultra-fast computing technologies such as quantum computing in order to perform calculations such as those described in “psychohistory,” including Boltzmann machines.

I have already mentioned that science fiction writers are sometimes commissioned to create scenarios to determine the direction to take in corporate management and policy making, and I think that reading science fiction can help us find the seeds of technology and think about the specific use cases in the world where these technologies are used. By reading science fiction, we can find the seeds of technology and think about the specific use cases of the world in which they are used.