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| https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/12/04/foundation-isaac-asimov/ |
A Sense of Doubt blog post #2339 - Trailer for new FOUNDATION TV Series - ASIMOV
It's a science fiction kinda summer.
Now, I also have to re-read Asimov's Foundation as well to get ready for the new APPLE TV+ show starting September 24th.
But I am dubious about reading even the Asimov books -- all seven of them -- by September let alone three more.
Anyway, I am excited about this TV show even I do not prep with reads and re-reads before it debuts.
https://ew.com/tv/the-foundation-trailer-breakdown-david-s-goyer/
Foundation showrunner breaks down the new trailer for Apple's sprawling sci-fi series
David S. Goyer speaks to EW about adapting Isaac Asimov's influential books for the first time.
Welcome to Foundation, Apple's biggest, most ambitious TV series to date.
The new trailer for the upcoming sci-fi drama from showrunner David S. Goyer realizes for the first time an adaptation of the book series by Isaac Asimov, whose literary works went on to inspire George Lucas' Star Wars.
Set during the reign of a Galactic Empire (see the Star Wars influence?), Foundation hones in on Dr. Hari Seldon (Chernobyl's Jared Harris), who's able to predict the fall of civilization. Branded an outcast, he takes a group of his supporters to the furthest reaches of the galaxy to establish a foundation of knowledge so that humanity won't have to start from scratch when it bounces back from the impending dark ages.
"When Asimov was writing [the books], his family, they were Jews, immigrated from Russia before World War II, but they saw that things were getting bad with the rise of Nazism," Goyer explains to EW. "He was wondering why this terrible thing happened with the Holocaust. If we look back through history, could we have prevented it from happening? There were a lot of antecedents leading up to the Holocaust going back generations and generations. Asimov responded to the idea of, how do we prevent these things from happening again? Humanity seems like it keeps falling into the same trap."
To get a firmer grasp on this story, which spans a thousand years and premieres on Apple TV+ this Sept. 24, EW spoke with Goyer to break down the biggest moments from the trailer.
The Genetic Dynasty
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Lee Pace in 'Foundation.' | CREDIT: APPLE TV+ |
The first moment in the trailer sees an old man (Terrence Mann) visiting a newborn suspended in a tank late one night. "I can't be the first one who wanted to see my youngest self," he says.
This is Brother Dusk, a member of the Cleon Genetic Dynasty, the previously mentioned Galactic Empire. The Imperium began with Emperor Cleon, and since then it's been ruled by clones of himself.
"There's three of them at different ages," Goyer says. "There's Dawn [the youngest], Day [the middle-aged clone played by Lee Pace (Guardians of the Galaxy)], and Dusk [the elder]."
"They raise each other," he continues. "They call each other brothers, but they're not exactly brothers. They relate to one another as father and grandfather, but they're not exactly that. When they see an older version of themselves, they literally know what they're going to look like when they get to that age. There's reassurance in that, but they also hate each other because of it. Even though they're the most powerful guys in the galaxy, each one of them desperately wants to prove that they're unique, even though there's been 14 of them before. They're all living in the shadow of the first."
"Our Genetic Dynasty has reigned for almost four centuries," Brother Day says as footage of a planet-destroying fleet of ships comes on screen. "The might of the Imperium has brought peace to thousands of worlds, but the beliefs of one man now threaten the empire's very existence."
That man would be...
The first moment in the trailer sees an old man (Terrence Mann) visiting a newborn suspended in a tank late one night. "I can't be the first one who wanted to see my youngest self," he says.
This is Brother Dusk, a member of the Cleon Genetic Dynasty, the previously mentioned Galactic Empire. The Imperium began with Emperor Cleon, and since then it's been ruled by clones of himself.
"There's three of them at different ages," Goyer says. "There's Dawn [the youngest], Day [the middle-aged clone played by Lee Pace (Guardians of the Galaxy)], and Dusk [the elder]."
"They raise each other," he continues. "They call each other brothers, but they're not exactly brothers. They relate to one another as father and grandfather, but they're not exactly that. When they see an older version of themselves, they literally know what they're going to look like when they get to that age. There's reassurance in that, but they also hate each other because of it. Even though they're the most powerful guys in the galaxy, each one of them desperately wants to prove that they're unique, even though there's been 14 of them before. They're all living in the shadow of the first."
"Our Genetic Dynasty has reigned for almost four centuries," Brother Day says as footage of a planet-destroying fleet of ships comes on screen. "The might of the Imperium has brought peace to thousands of worlds, but the beliefs of one man now threaten the empire's very existence."
That man would be...
Hari Seldon
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Jared Harris in 'Foundation.' | CREDIT: APPLE TV+ |
"Hari Seldon's the smartest person you will ever meet," Goyer says. "He's the smartest person in the galaxy, except possibly for Gaal." (More on her in a moment.)
Dr. Seldon specializes in the study of psychohistory, which is essentially pouring over mathematics to predict the future of large civilizations. That's how he's able to solve a complex equation that points to the self-destruction of the Cleon empire, which the empire, clearly, doesn't appreciate.
"No one understands his mathematics. They know he's really smart, but they don't know whether he's lying or not. And that's what makes the empire really nervous," Goyer elaborates. "That's why they reach out to Gaal."
Played by newcomer Lou Llobell, Gaal is a rising mathematician in the galaxy who's drawn into Hari's orbit. She's the only other person who's able understand the psychohistory Hari is talking about.
"One of the things that I'm excited to explore with [Hari's] character is what it takes to be a person who realizes the world's going to end in a really bad way, realizes he has to break that news to everyone, and realizes that none of those people can be saved. It's going to be their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren. How does he try to get people on board to build something that'll be beyond their lifetime? So, he's got this incredibly heavy weight on his shoulders and this burden of like, 'I'm just telling you what the math is. Don't blame the messenger,' which of course everyone wants to do."
Goyer likens the dilemma to Dr. Fauci's attempt to educate a skeptical public about COVID-19 in the Trump era, though global warming also comes to mind. In either case, the concept "can talk about things that are happening in our world now, but not in a way that hopefully it seems like you're preaching," he says.
"You're entertaining people first and maybe getting them to think about things after the fact, whether it's global warming, whether it's globalization, whether it's Brexit, whether it's the polarization of what's happening in America today," Goyer continues. "The irony is they are not new upheavals. They're upheavals that have happened again and again and again throughout society going back tens of thousands of years. An optimist would say, 'Hey, the cycles happened before. Can we learn anything from it?' In a way, that's what the show's about."
The Vault
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Leah Harvey in 'Foundation.' | CREDIT: APPLE TV+ |
Another aspect of Foundation has to do with a mysterious floating object glimpsed in the last shot of the trailer. This is the Vault on the planet Terminus, where Seldon and his followers are banished for spreading his doomsday predictions. Goyer mentions "there's a version of [the Vault] in the book," but the version in the show is "a bit more ambitious."
"No one knows where it came from. It was there on Terminus when the colonists arrived and it's one of the mystery boxes of the show," he explains. "We'll definitely find out what's in the Vault in the season, although there are other mysteries to reveal about the Vault in later seasons. All we know is that Salvor has a very special relationship to the Vault."
Played by Leah Harvey, Salvor is the only person who's able to approach the object.
"It has what we call a null field, which is designed to keep people away," Goyer mentions. "If you try to approach it, you get headaches, you get nosebleeds, eventually you pass out. But for some reason, Salvor Hardin can walk through the null field. She can touch the Vault. There's something special about her and she has a relationship that we're going to explore over the course of the first season."
Creating planets
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Leah Harvey on the poster for 'Foundation.' | CREDIT: APPLE TV+ |
Foundation's trailer makes clear the high visual standards Goyer strove to achieve for the series. The production shot the show in an anamorphic format across six different countries, sometimes in the snow, sometimes on open water, sometimes under water.
"I was determined that we really went to these places," he says. "It's a show I wanted to be very textural. We went to the Canary Islands, we went to Berlin, we went to Malta, and we went to Iceland. The proof is in the pudding. The shoot was incredibly arduous. It's the hardest shoot that I've ever been involved in, but I really believe as much as possible in doing things for real and having as many real elements as possible. So when you see these sumptuous locales in episode 1 and episode 3, we weren't faking it."
It's like, "if Star Wars were made by Terrence Malick," he adds. "My producer hated me when we were in the Canary Islands. We shot at magic hour almost every single day. It was important to me that the actors were really experiencing the wind and the snow and the ocean, and that there'd actually be a bit of a struggle in the making of it. I think you feel that. I think you feel it in your bones."
Related content:
The Foundation Trilogy won a special Hugo for best series of all time. I don’t think they’re quite that good, but I do really like them. There are three books, Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952) and Second Foundation (1953). But those publication dates are misleading—the Foundation Trilogy really consists of stories that were published in Astounding between May 1942 and January 1950 and later revised and compiled into volumes. These are 1940s Campbellian stories, and the main strength and the main weakness of the books is that they consist of separate episodes with different characters covering the history of the Foundation for about five hundred years. These are not novels in any conventional sense. Decades later Asimov did write four novels in this universe, two prequels and two sequels, and there were also sharecropped novels written by other people. I don’t find any of these sufficiently interesting to go back to. I do keep picking up the original trilogy, however. They’re certainly old fashioned, but that’s part of their charm.
Mild spoilers below. Real spoilers will be indicated.
Hari Seldon developed the science of psychohistory, a statistical science of predicting the future, and he also set up a huge sociogenesis project to shorten the period of barbarism that would follow the inevitable fall of the Galactic Empire. This project consisted of two Foundations “at opposite ends of the Galaxy” set up so that if history unfolded according to Seldon’s laws the barbarism would be reduced from thirty thousand to a mere thousand years. This is a story with huge scope but at a kind of distance that makes it impossible to tell by normal methods. This is a story of historical forces playing out over a whole galaxy and centuries. What Asimov did was to make the Galaxy itself his real protagonist, and to tell the stories of limited individuals caught up in history, as we all are. There’s repetition of course, as he had to explain the set-up in each story, but the effect really is to give you the perspective of standing outside time. Characters in early stories have spaceships named after them in later stories. People have grandchildren. City planets become agricultural planets. Great forces play out and have individual effects. The zooming in and out of perspective has the effect of making the whole more than the sum of the parts.
Let’s start with the good things—this is a galaxy that’s verty lightly sketched but which feels real, and which has been incredibly influential on the subsequent development of SF. To take just one example, the city-world of Trantor was realised visually as Coruscant in the Star Wars movies, it’s been parodied by Harry Harrison and has become part of the general furniture of SF. It’s 1930s Manhattan gone global. The details all work—the names are evocative and very well done. Sometimes they’re taken directly from Gibbon—Bel Riose isn’t a very well disguised Belisarius—but Kalgan and Tazenda and Anacreon are all great names for planets. The Empire uses a spaceship and sun symbol. There’s not much description of anything ever—this is Asimov—but what there is hangs together.
Then I love psychohistory and the whole project of tampering with history from a viewpoint of understanding the forces that shape it. This is something that hasn’t been done much in SF—it was completely new when Asimov did it, and it has not been much imitated. Cherryh’s Cyteen concerns itself with this. But in general we don’t see much manipulation of society, and when we do our heroes tend to be opposed to it. Here it has a good end and they tend to be all for it.
As for the plot, the inevitable working out of Seldon’s plan is done very well. There are reversals of expectations and unexpected developments—unexpected to the reader, anyway. Asimov does well with the solution to one problem setting up a new problem down the line. And just when you’ve had enough of it all working out as Seldon expected, it all goes wrong, with the introduction of the Mule—a mutant who couldn’t be predicted.
Here we get to the things I don’t like. ACTUAL SPOILERS FROM NOW ON!
The Mule has mutant powers of telepathy and emotion control. He conquers a large chunk of the galaxy by converting his former enemies into enthusiastic slaves. The Seldon plan goes right off the rails. To get it back, the secret hidden Second Foundation needs to do something. And they do. And they have secret mind powers too. I have never liked psi powers in SF, but I don’t much mind the Mule having them. It’s just that the Second Foundation are supposed to be masters of psychohistory and psychology. I wanted them to defeat the Mule that way—and I hate all the brain tampering they do later. It feels like cheating. I have always found it deeply disappointing and I still do.
However, this brings me to a thing I like a lot—Arkady Darrell. Now there are no women (except for a mention of “wives and families”) until half way through the second book. But for me this utterly sexist assumption is absolutely redeemed by the presence of Arkady Darrell in Second Foundation. Arkady is a fifteen year old girl that I totally identified with when I was twelve, and I still love her. I smile when I think about her. I don’t like that she inveigled the home-made listening device out of a boy instead of whipping it up herself, but otherwise she was the girl hero I so seldom found, stowing away on spaceships, visiting Trantor, solving the mystery. She’s no Podkayne, she’s active and engaged—and her homework assignment is the smoothest funniest way of getting the backstory into an episode that Asimov ever found.
In this re-read, I remembered the solution to the puzzle of where the Second Foundation were, the question of where the “other end of the galaxy” was. But I misremembered that Arkady worked it out correctly, that after the set-up answer of “a circle has no end” I thought she realised that the opposite end of a spiral is the centre, and that Seldon was a psychohistorian. I was wrong, or the Second Foundation tampered with my memory the way they did with Arkady’s. I think I’d just rewritten the ending in my head to be more satisfying.
As for clunky and old fashioned, their computers are hilarious, and they plan galactic trips through hyperspace using slide rules. File that under “part of the charm.” The First Speaker says that Seldon’s plan could have broken with a real advance in tech, which seems to me nonsense—historical inevitability takes into account changing technology and can predict that it will happen if not what and when. Also we see advancing tech—the astonishing lens that lets you view the stars as they would appear from any planet. (Probably available as an iPhone app. But where is my galactic empire?) This is also ahistorical—the tech level of the middle ages was above that of the Roman Empire in anything that didn’t require huge scale resource management. What got lost was infrastructure, not actual tech advances. So I think that the first speaker misunderstood the Plan.
If you have never read these and you pick them up as a piece of science fiction history, you may find you keep reading them because you’re having fun.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published two poetry collections and nine novels, most recently Among Others, and if you liked this post you will like it. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
Foundation by Isaac Asimov (1951)
7 data science principles introduced in Asimov’s Foundation
Authors’ imagination often foreshadowed real inventions. Let’s think on technical achievements first introduced in Jules Verne’s novels like submarine and helicopter, or cellphone-like widgets called communicator in Star Trek, and also the six degrees of separation concept that was described in Frigyes Karinthy’s short story in 1929, couple of years before Moreno started to study social networks.
The same happened with data mining. The first book describing the basic concept was the Foundation series written by Asimov. The first part was published in 1951, decades before any data mining analysis was executed and before computers made it possible to happen at all. The Foundation series became one of the most famous science-fiction opuses, it also won the one-time Hugo Award for “Best All-Time Series” in 1966.
This post focuses on the data mining aspects of the Foundation, and tries to give as few spoilers about the story as possible. The series is excellent and not only because of the hidden data mining principles. The story is also exciting and eventful confirmed by several awards. Christmas is approaching, if you haven’t read the Foundation series (enough times), ask Santa…
The situation in a nutshell: Hari Seldon mathematician created a new profound statistical science called psychohistory. He uses statistics to predict the decay of the Galactic Empire and to influence the long-term future history of mankind.
Let’s see one by one the basic rules of predictive model building, how amazingly Asimov anticipated them.
1. Huge amount of data is needed to produce reliable results.
The definition of psychohistory in the novel:
Gaal Dornick, using nonmathematical concepts, has defined psychohistory to be that branch of mathematics which deals with the reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli… Implicit in all these definitions is the assumption that the human conglomerate being dealt with is sufficiently large for valid statistical treatment. The necessary size of such a conglomerate may be determined by Seldon’s First Theorem which …
Psychohistory predicts the behavior of crowds. It says explicitly that the analysis is valid only for mass of people. In data mining the same is true: to predict churners of a company or credit loan default accurately and reliably we need large amount of past data. The bigger the better. Maybe this short citation from the Foundation is the first mention of recently hyped big data phenomenon as well. 😉
2. The amount of data implicates that the analysis requires computers, manual computation is impractical.
Seldon removed his calculator pad from the pouch at his belt. Men said he kept one beneath his pillow for use in moments of wakefulness. Its gray, glossy finish was slightly worn by use. Seldon’s nimble fingers, spotted now with age, played along the files and rows of buttons that filled its surface. Red symbols glowed out from the upper tier.
Today it is pretty obvious that we use computers for almost everything. But the circumstances were quite different when the book was published. The prototype of the first commercial computers called UNIVAC were built between 1943 and 1946. Because of a patent rights dispute the first machine was delivered only on 31 March 1951. These first commercial computers were so large that they filled bigger rooms, the processing speed was 0.525 ms for arithmetic functions, 2.15 ms for multiplication and 3.9 ms for division.
So imagining a personal tablet at that time dealing with data of quintillion of human beings means a brilliant divination.
3. Simple predictive models could be refined by adding more fields into the analysis.
He said, “That represents the condition of the Empire at present.” He waited. Gaal said finally, “Surely that is not a complete representation.” “No, not complete,” said Seldon. “I am glad you do not accept my word blindly. However, this is an approximation which will serve to demonstrate the proposition. Will you accept that?” “Subject to my later verification of the derivation of the function, yes.” Gaal was carefully avoiding a possible trap. “Good. Add to this the known probability of Imperial assassination, viceregal revolt, the contemporary recurrence of periods of economic depression, the declining rate of planetary explorations, the. . .”
He proceeded. As each item was mentioned, new symbols sprang to life at his touch, and melted into the basic function which expanded and changed.
Data scientists do the same. To get a good prediction we need to involve several aspects describing all the effects that might be correlated with the predicted events. This way numerous fields are merged from different data sources and also new derived fields are calculated. The accuracy of the prediction is increasing with the number of relevant descriptive variables.
4. The results of the predictions are given in percentages.
“It will end well; almost certainly so for the project; and with reasonable probability for you.” “What are the figures?” demanded Gaal. “For the project, over 99.9%.” “And for myself?” I am instructed that this probability is 77.2%.” “Then I’ve got better than one chance in five of being sentenced to prison or to death.” “The last is under one per cent.”
“Indeed. Calculations upon one man mean nothing. You send Dr. Seldon to me.”
In classification models the results are usually given in percentages. For example we see the probability of churn for every customer. We can define a cut-off value and calculate the predicted class, but that is only a derived result from the percentages and to use the percentages is always more accurate. Confidence intervals could also be calculated to this probability, which is the next item on this list.
5. Use confidence interval.
Within another half year he would have been here and the odds would have been stupendously against us — 96.3 plus or minus 0.05% to be exact. We have spent considerable time analyzing the forces that stopped him.
This one is the most surprising. The confidence intervals were introduced by Jerzy Neyman in 1937! Using it in a novel published in the 1950s means that Asimov was really update in the latest achievements of statistics. This can be explained by his PhD in biochemistry, which he earned in 1948 and his scientific career as a professor of biochemistry at Boston University School of Medicine.
6. Predictions for individuals are much less reliable.
Seldon said, “I’ll be honest. I don’t know. It depends on the Chief Commissioner. I have studied him for years. I have tried to analyze his workings, but you know how risky it is to introduce the
vagaries of an individual in the psychohistoric equations. Yet I have hopes.”
For example in churn models we do the analysis on customer level, but the prediction for a single customer is confusing: suppose that he/she has 67% probability of churn. For non-mathematicians it is pretty hard to explain what does it mean. It is like Schrödinger’s cat. The customer is a churner with probability of 67% and at the same time he is loyal with probability 33%. In this case we would foretell that the customer will churn, but he has notable probability to remain loyal. For individuals the effect of the fortune is large. There is a chance of unpredictable events happening like having an accident or winning the lottery, but the impact of these accidental events decrease significantly if we consider mass of people.
Having 1000 customer with exactly the same 67% probability of churn, we could state that around 670 (plus or minus a small percentage) of them will churn, but we don’t know exactly who those churners will be. The results are always more reliable on aggregated level.
7. Predictions for near future are more accurate than predictions for far future.
I am Hari Seldon! I do not know if anyone is here at all by mere sense-perception but that is unimportant. I have few fears as yet of a breakdown in the Plan. For the first three centuries the percentage probability of nondeviation is nine-four point two. […] Seldon is off his rocker. He’s got the wrong crisis. […] Then the Mule is an added feature, unprepared for in Seldon’s psychohistory.
We’ve been blinded by Seldon’s psychohistory, one of the first propositions of which is that the individual does not count, does not make history, and that complex social and economic factors override him, make a puppet out of him. […]
But the Mule is not a man, he is a mutant. Already, he had upset Seldon’s plan, and if you’ll stop to analyze the implications, it means that he — one man — one mutant — upset all of Seldon’s psychohistory.
The predictions are valid only under conditions similar to the training data’s circumstances. As time goes on the probability of major changes occurring increases so the reliability of the predictions decreases. In the novel 300 years passed since Hari Seldon’s calculations were completed and a mutant man turned up who was so powerful, that he alone could change the history. Seldon had no chance to foresee this happening decades ago when there were no mutants.
The concept imagined by Asimov is working nowadays in data mining but slightly differently: we use computers and statistics to predict the outcome of elections or sporting events, the climate change, etc., but unfortunately circumstances are volatile so we can not make predictions for hundreds of years in advance … yet!
Originally published at www.balabit.com on December 16, 2015 Eszter Windhager-Pokol.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2107.14 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2203 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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