Your friend Jim George thinks you'd be a great addition to Ricochet, so we'd like to offer you a special deal: You can become a member for no initial charge for one month!
Ricochet is a community of like-minded people who enjoy writing about and discussing politics (usually of the center-right nature), culture, sports, history, and just about every other topic under the sun in a fully moderated environment. We’re so sure you’ll like Ricochet, we’ll let you join and get your first month for free. Kick the tires: read the always eclectic member feed, write some posts, join discussions, participate in a live chat or two, and listen to a few of our over 50 (free) podcasts on every conceivable topic, hosted by some of the biggest names on the right, for 30 days on us. We’re confident you’re gonna love it.
They were evaluating different “equations.” WOPR was looking for ways for the US/population to survive. Skynet was looking for ways for IT to survive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7VkjA8IQxE
The way I remember it, the point of the original Foundation trilogy was that psychohistory didn’t work. Seldon set up the Foundations, and then the Mule came along…
Agree completely on Asimov, now, in retrospect. The writing itself was agonizing to plow through. The ideas, as I look back, were pure utopian garbage, socialist in nature, assuming that human behaviors can be managed and controlled and predicted by just the right people with enough computational power.
Is Trump The Mule?
Skynet plowed the missiles into the ground? Airbursts are more effective.
See? Failure of computational power.
When Rose Wilder Lane visited the Soviet Union circa 1920, she was still a Communist. After she explained the benefits of central planning to a disbelieving village leader, he shook his head sadly and said:
It is too big – he said – too big. At the top, it is too small. It will not work. In Moscow there are only men, and man is not God. A man has only a man’s head, and one hundred heads together do not make one great big head. No. Only God can know Russia.
The Soviet Union continued pursuing its dream that one hundred (or ten thousand) heads together would make one great big and brilliant head, in the 1950s and afterwards supplemented for even more brilliance by electronic computers. In his book Red Plenty…part history, part novel…Francis Spufford tells the story from the standpoint of the people who actually had to try to make it work. Review.
I listened to that recently on Audio. I wouldn’t ordinarily read or listen to something that is “part novel,” but it was in my audio queue. As usual, I wondered who had recommended it, as I can never remember those things. I figured it was somebody from Ricochet, but I didn’t remember who. I’ll bet it was you.
But yes, scenes from that book came to mind as I was reading the OP and the comments here.
I’m re-reading the trilogy right now (almost done), thanks to a prod here on Ricochet recently. Your memory is faulty. The Mule was dealt with. (No further spoilers.)
But Henry’s assessment of the trilogy largely matches mine. I don’t think it’s unreadable, though, just juvenile.
What are you talking about? Women don’t wear hats anymore.
Thats fair. Modeling the atmosphere to produce extremely long term forecasts may not be possible.
I think its funny, that most people wont put the umbrella in the car on the strength of a 10 day forecast, demand the government spend 10s of Trillions on the strength of a 100 year forecast.
We are about to get a real-world test of simultaneous routing of a lot of vehicles, with real-time timing constraints…
Discussions of flying cars and widespread drone delivery rarely seem to address the problems of *traffic* and *air traffic control*. Imagine ten thousand or a hundred thousand airborne vehicles, with a diversity of origins and destinations, in a dense metropolitan area.
There is work underway on this problem, sponsored I believe by both the FAA and NASA as well as some individual corporations. Assuming that the tracking and communication problems can be solved (I don’t think the tracking can be done by radar and probably not by the relatively new ADS-B system, either), the routing problem remains. The good news is that an optimal solution is *not* necessary; near-optimum is surely sufficient. The bad news is that the solution needs to be extremely failure-resilient.
One of the reasons why traffic collisions etc are only as bad as they are, is because of GRAVITY. And FRICTION. Flying cars have the potential to cause so much more carnage than what we have now, people don’t even seem to suspect or imagine.
The even larger problem, really, was that the “psychohistory” predictions snapped right back to being correct again. Ridiculous. But if Trump IS The Mule, then for sure Democrats are hoping that Asimov was right!
They would say that’s because if they don’t have an umbrella when it rains, they just get wet. But if we don’t spend 10s of Trillions, All Life On Earth May End! And We Can’t Take The Chance!
They would also likely say that even if the global-doom prediction isn’t correct, a world without fossil fuels etc is still better.
At least, they might say those things if they were as smart as me. :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2dK4UYAwSI&feature=youtu.be&t=96
Interestingly, the drone coordination problem is a much simpler and more manageable one, if the only priority is the safe transit of large numbers of drones. What Rob imagines is optimized routing; all the drone network really needs is collision avoidance, since drones, by their nature, can be expected to be less dependent on optimal transit times.
Safe drone flight in a crowded environment is a beautiful example of emergent behavior. Bird flocking behavior, the forming and reforming and swooping and apparently coordinated movement of large flocks of birds, can be simulated with uncanny verisimilitude using only two or three rules which every member of the flock applies independently — and with absolutely no central coordination. Similarly, drones can be programmed to travel in predefined drone corridors and to avoid collision with other objects, but otherwise manage their own routing.
Flying cars? I don’t think that’s going to happen, not in my lifetime.
Shot this four blocks from my house about a month ago. I think the problem with the flying cars is the landing….
No, the predictions did not snap right back. Re-establishing the plan post-Mule (with complications) is the plot of the third book of the trilogy. Asimov’s elitism and statist ideas are worthy of much criticism, but at least do so without misstating the plot of his books.
Predicting averages is a lot easier than predicting the sequences of variations about the mean. In other words, predicting long-term climate is a lot easier than predicting long-term weather. It’s still pretty difficult, though, and I wouldn’t place a lot of credence in the predictions even if they weren’t politicized.
Short-term predictions are another matter. I do a lot of planning for my bicycle rides or gardening chores at home based on 10-day weather forecasts, which are accurate enough to be very useful. It’s a lot different than when I was a kid.
What a disturbing idea. I’d prefer to think of Obama as the Mule, in which case Trump is the beginning of the Second Foundation’s frenetic efforts to put things back on track.
Nice! I like that much better too.