Disney's "Foundation" premiered, and after reading some comments, it seems that it is completely different from the original work. It's not necessary for it to be exactly the same as the original, after all, most of the original work is dull dialogue. However, it shouldn't be completely different either, because the original novel has such a high status for its unique core, which the screenwriters seem to have missed.
Among the science fiction novels with cross-disciplinary influence, "Foundation" is one of the top ones. It has influenced countless science fiction writers, scientists, sociologists, economists, computer experts, and even Osama bin Laden.
The book presents a proposition that is highly tempting to them: Can human behavior be predicted? After that, numerous famous science fiction works (movies, animations, novels) have expanded on this proposition. More importantly, countless people have been working in the fields of politics, economics, society, and the internet to achieve this, in order to obtain predictability or control over human groups.
To discuss the idea of predicting human behavior, let's first discuss how Asimov approached it in "Foundation".
First, the blueprint for "Foundation" was based on Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". This book is extremely long, but it is interesting to read. If only Asimov had such good writing skills. Referring to "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", the tone is that the Galactic Empire is about to decline and needs to preserve the spark of civilization and shorten the subsequent dark ages. Then, the three crises correspond to warlord separatism, the rise of Christianity, and the age of great navigation and trade.
Next, Asimov had three theoretical sources for feasibility prediction.
a) Boltzmann's kinetic theory of gases states that individual gas molecules cannot be predicted, but the overall behavior can be predicted. As long as humans are viewed as a whole, they can be predicted.
b) Spengler's "The Decline of the West" compares civilization to a living organism with cycles of prosperity and decline.
c) Toynbee's "A Study of History" states that the rise of civilization comes from elite leaders successfully responding to crisis challenges.
Here, we will only discuss the "Foundation" trilogy and not the prequels or sequels. Because the author's writing span was long, the intentions he wanted to express had already changed when writing the prequels and sequels.
The structure of "Foundation" is that Hari Seldon invents psychohistory, using a complex formula to predict the future by treating humans as parameters. The First Foundation is a group of technical experts who arrive at Terminus in the name of compiling an encyclopedia. They preserve the technological civilization after the decline of the empire and deal with crises predicted by psychohistory. However, there is also a Second Foundation composed of psychohistorians secretly correcting the deviations in the predictions.
The establishment of everything Asimov imagined is not without flaws, but there are ways to fill the gaps. The corresponding methods for the three sources are:
a) We know about the butterfly effect and dissipative theory, and long-term prediction is impossible. But we can continuously revise it using big data, supercomputing systems, and artificial intelligence to eliminate the unstable factors in the system. Many science fiction works in later generations follow this route, such as "Minority Report," "The Matrix," "Westworld Season 3," and "Psychopass." In reality, intelligence and public opinion systems in various countries also use similar principles to predict abnormal signals.
b) Comparing civilization to the rise and fall of a living organism, this concept has been widely expanded in later generations, such as the system of information theory living on negative entropy. Systems need to continuously absorb negative entropy (energy, information) to maintain local self-organizing structures. This concept is also widely applied, such as in "Puella Magi Madoka Magica."
c) Toynbee's theory of challenge and response corresponds to Wiener's cybernetics. Cybernetics requires a system to maintain a negative feedback system in order to be stable.
Nowadays, terms like negative entropy, negative feedback, and robustness appear in various strange scenarios because they correspond to the three theories of the 1980s: systems theory, information theory, and cybernetics. These are powerful tools that many people are accustomed to using.
To explain why the empire would perish using this jargon, it means that the vast territory of the empire is difficult to maintain as an agile and effective negative feedback system. In the absence of maintaining negative entropy input, the system can only prioritize maintaining order in the capital, and the distant borderlands will be sacrificed and lose control. It's like a big tree with branches gradually withering, with only the trunk remaining alive. The preservation of the trunk depends on what your aunt calls the dragon knights on the high-speed rail. Ultimately, due to the decay of the branches, the trunk cannot be preserved either. Just like the city of Rome described by Gibbon, a monster with everyone sharing one neck, it will eventually end because it cannot absorb negative entropy.
This kind of prediction only applies to closed systems, but this is precisely why people are so enthusiastic about predicting closed systems, because closed systems are unstable and can only establish a temporary stable structure with negative entropy input, which is unsustainable. By the way, what Soros is enthusiastic about is destroying this kind of closed system, and his goal is to establish an open society.
However, open systems are unpredictable because new orders of negative entropy will emerge everywhere in open systems.
I don't know if you can understand it, but I tried my best to explain it. In addition, Asimov made interesting observations about some systems in the prequels and sequels, which I will discuss separately in the future.