Tag: Isaac Asimov

Paging Dr. Susan Calvin — The Possible Future Need For Man-Machine ‘Couple’s Counslers’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

There is a lot of debate these days about what jobs will still be around once our AI overlords take over. Well, one possible new job will be real-life Dr. Susan Calvins from the I, Robot series of short stories written by Isaac Asimov.

What Reddit thinks Dr. Susan Calvin looks like.

It could be that once you can no longer rage-quit out of an argument with your Knowledge Navigator that you’re going to have find a different way to fix your “relationship” with your Navi.

Of course, the usual caveats about the possibility of the Singularity making all of this moot apply. But, if the Singularity and the accompanying ASI doesn’t happen, then LLMs with infinite memory could be a real issue with real problems that have to be solved.

As an aside, I still think Phoebe Waller-Bridge would be a great Dr. Susan Calvin. She very much fits what I imagine the character looking and acting like in my imagination. There are many, many I, Robot short stories for Amazon to use as the basis of a series about Dr. Calvin.

We Risk Becoming The ‘Spacers’ Of Asimov’s Robot Series

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

If you want a glimpse into one possible future for the world, look no further than the “Spacers” of the Isaac Asimov Robot series of novels. The specific book I would recommend is “Robots of Dawn.”

The Spacers lived a long time, but they also use androids as the basis of their civilization. This leads to them becoming stagnate and never expanding beyond a core set of planets — I think it was something like 100.

Meanwhile, other humans, who didn’t rely upon androids so much ultimately took over the galaxy. Anyway, the Spacers of Robots of Dawn are very relevant to today’s discourse about AI and robotics.

Hollywood, Take Note: Isaac Asimov’s ‘Mule’ Is An Allegory For Donald Trump

By Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls

I keep talking about and feel like I’m shouting out into the void, but here I go again. The reason why I keep talking about how Isaac Asimov’s character in The Foundation Saga, The Mule, is Donald Trump is because Trump isn’t funny anymore.

For nearly two years, we’ve spent a lot of time joking about Trump and it’s time we stopped falloning Trump and started to take him as the tragic, Shakespearean character that he is. Trump is doing real damage to America both at home and abroad and it makes a lot of sense for Hollywood to stop lashing out randomly at Trump and start to weld its cultural power in a much more constructive manner.

Hence, a movie that dealt with just the portion of The Foundation Saga that deals with The Mule would be pretty cool and culturally powerful because for much of the novel, The Mule is something of a comic character. It’s only later, when his true identity is reveled that he becomes dark and sinister.

I feel like we’ve reached the point in the Trump saga when if you made a reasonably faithful adaption of The Foundation Saga that you might have a pretty big hit on your hands, on a par with A Game Of Thrones. Of course, given how much Star Wars copped from Foundation, you would have to be pretty creative to to make the universe seem fresh.

But if you simply made a movie about the specific part of The Foundation Saga that deals with The Mule, I think you could pull it off.