# Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov (c. 1920–1992) was an American writer and biochemistry professor, one of the "Big Three" of twentieth-century science fiction alongside [[Arthur C. Clarke]] and [[Robert A. Heinlein]], and the single most influential SF author on the worldview of the modern tech elite. He published or edited an extraordinary volume of work across fiction and popular science, but two creations carry his weight in this vault: the [[Foundation]] saga and the [[Three Laws of Robotics]]. ## The two load-bearing ideas **Foundation** (begun 1942, collected as a trilogy in the 1950s) imagines *psychohistory* — a mathematics of mass behavior that lets a small "Foundation" of scientists foresee the collapse of a galactic empire and act to shorten the resulting dark age from thirty thousand years to one thousand. The premise is a flattering one for anyone who believes a competent technical elite can read history's direction and steer it; that is precisely why it became gospel in Silicon Valley. **The Three Laws of Robotics**, first stated together in "Runaround" (1942), gave the culture its enduring intuition that machine intelligence can be made safe by hard-wired rules. Asimov coined "robotics" and "positronic" in the process. Crucially, his robot stories are mostly demonstrations of how such rules *fail* — making him, read correctly, the first major author of [[AI Safety]] cautionary literature rather than the author of a working safety standard. See [[Three Laws of Robotics]] for the full treatment. ## Influence on the tech elite [[Elon Musk]] credits Foundation as "fundamental to creation of [[SpaceX]]," casting himself as a real-world Hari Seldon preserving the "light of consciousness," and fusing it with Asimov's Zeroth Law (humanity over the individual) as a personal mandate. A copy of the trilogy was placed aboard the [[Tesla]] Roadster launched on Falcon Heavy in 2018. The Foundation premise also runs quietly beneath the [[Longtermism]] now common among AI founders. Asimov is Case One in [[Science Fiction and the Tech Elite]]. ## See also - [[Foundation]] · [[I, Robot]] — the major works - [[Three Laws of Robotics]] — his most-cited contribution to AI discourse - [[Science Fiction and the Tech Elite]] — the hub - [[Arthur C. Clarke]] · [[Robert A. Heinlein]] — the other two of the "Big Three"