Disney's "Foundation" premiered, and I took a look at the comments, which said it was completely different from the original. It's not necessary for it to be exactly the same as the original, after all, most of the original work is boring dialogue. But it can't be completely different either, because the reason why the original novel has such a high status is because of 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 extremely tempting to them: Can human behavior be predicted? After him, countless famous science fiction works (movies, animations, novels) have expanded on this proposition. More importantly, countless people in politics, economics, society, and the internet have tried to achieve this in order to obtain predictability or control over human groups.
In order to discuss the idea of predicting human behavior, let's first discuss how Asimov thought about it in "Foundation".
First of all, the blueprint for "Foundation" was based on Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". This book is very long, but it is very interesting to read. It would be great if Asimov had such good writing skills. Referring to "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 era of great navigation and commerce.
Then, Asimov has three theoretical sources for the feasibility of prediction.
a) Boltzmann's kinetic theory of gases, individual gas molecules are unpredictable, but the whole can be predicted. As long as humans are viewed as a whole, they can be predicted.
b) Spengler's "The Decline of the West", civilization is like a living organism, with cycles of prosperity and decline.
c) Toynbee's "A Study of History", the rise of civilization comes from elite leaders successfully dealing with crisis challenges.
Here we only discuss the "Foundation" trilogy and not the prequels or sequels. Because the author's ideas have changed over the long span of time in which he wrote the prequels and sequels.
The structure of "Foundation" is that Seldon invented psychohistory, using humans as parameters in a complex formula to predict the future. The First Foundation is a group of technical experts who arrived at Terminus in the name of compiling an encyclopedia. They preserved the technological civilization after the decline of the empire and dealt with crises predicted by psychohistory. But in reality, there is also a Second Foundation composed of psychohistorians who secretly correct the deviations that appear in the predictions.
The whole concept imagined by Asimov himself 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, long-term prediction is impossible. But we can use big data, supercomputing systems, and artificial intelligence to continuously correct and remove 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 practice, 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, in reality, there is a broader extension, which is the system of information theory that lives on negative entropy. The system needs 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 contexts 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, just like a big tree with branches gradually withering, with only the trunk remaining alive. The preservation of the trunk depends on the dragon knights on the high-speed rail, as your aunt said. In the end, due to the decay of the branches, the trunk also cannot survive. The capital, like the city of Rome described by Gibbon, is a monster with everyone sharing one neck, and it will eventually come to an end because it cannot draw 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 steady-state structure with negative entropy input, and this negative entropy 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.
And open systems are unpredictable. Because in open systems, new orders of negative entropy will emerge everywhere.
I don't know if you can understand it, but I tried my best to explain it. In addition, Asimov has made interesting observations about some systems in the prequels and sequels, which I will discuss separately in the future.