Which will lead to a new suite of superbugs.
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With strange and costly trade-offs for these adaptations.
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Why am I envisioning a group of rough and tumble wildcat drillers being shrunken down to use their knowledge of extreme drilling to destroy the superbug.
Maybe throw a love story in there as well.
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And can you strap buttered toast to the back of a cat (butter side up) and achieve levitation?
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And will it last until you stop bleeding?
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But, why go to astrology when AI can totally predict the future???
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Cities In Flight, But Upside-Down
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Not Blue Öyster Cult?
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And psychohistory didn’t use AI, or even much in the way of computers.
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That was my first reaction too, but then I remembered:
Still no AI, though, unless one is being really unkind…
…although, then again, the whole Seldon thing could have just been engineered by R. Daneel Olivaw (after all, he had a hand in it anyways), so we loop back around again.
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I was assuming electronic (or equivalent) computer there! But I guess Seldon and his merry gang were computers of the old sort. In his 1980s novel, Foundation’s Edge, he shows two of the Psychohistorians gazing at acres of projected equations with no hint of them being used in computer simulations. Maybe that was left for the staff.
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And we should remember machines called “computers” go back to the late 19th century. This is why DEC called their machine the PDP, which means it’s a Programmed Data Processor, not simply an over-grown adding machine like IBM was making.
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The speaker in this video says that it was an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of DEC’s management, which was not interested in competing with IBM.
If you wanted more than an adding machine, IBM offered the 7000 series, and the IBM 1620.
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That is possibly a reason too. But my basic point was that machines called “computer” have a long history and existed when Asimov came up with his “Psychohistory.”
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In the 1950s, Asimov wrote a number of stories featuring the Multivac-- an electronic computer . But the earliest Foundation stories predate those. I only mention it because the wikipedia article links to the stories involved.
Here, for instance, is a story on electronic voting.
“Somehow through his depression, he had still looked forward to seeing Multivac.They said it was half a mile long, and three stories high. that 50 technicians walked the corridors within its struicture continuously. It was one of the wonders of the world.”
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Sounds like a server farm.
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