Foundation (Fundación), de Isaac Asimov | AppleTV

Supuestamente, en teoría, la Ley Zeroth se impone por encima de la 1ª Ley de la Robótica.
En la práctica, Giskard se desactiva al aplicar la Ley Zeroth, e incluso le causa problemas a Daneel:
No en vano, una de las razones por las que busca la creación de la psicohistoria (Preludio a la Fundación y Hacia la Fundación), es para tener una manera de cuantificar matemáticamente que determinada decisión es la mejor para la humanidad en general; y también por esa misma razón crea más adelante Gaia (puesto que así podría manejar a la humanidad como si fuese un individuo).

Así que efectivamente, el hecho de que Demerzel mate a alguien que ni si quiera es una amenaza para la humanidad es otra patada a la esencia de los libros. Quizá nos lo cuenten como una excusa de que tiene que permanecer cerca de Imperio para poder seguir trazando sus planes, pero es muy forzado.

From 52:50 -

"Hari Seldon is the consummate domain expert but he has his shortcomings. His personal shortcomings, and they're a product of his experience and a product of his childhood. We're going to start to explore those. And they do inform his math, and they did inform Psychohistory. And so, but that's interesting as well and certainly something Asimov wasn't interested in."

This is from a guy who says math as he sees it must be "like the language of angels." But he also grew up never getting math and never being good at it.

From 24:25 -

In identifying the core concepts that make Foundation unique -

"The other challenge is that when Foundation came out 70 years ago the audience, much less the world was completely different. He was using science fiction as social allegory, the Empire - yes he was basing Foundation on the fall of the Roman Empire - but the Empire he was interrogating with his metaphors was a post World War II environment."

About the fall of European monarchy, apparently. And that's "not the world we are living in today."

"What are Empires that are falling today? That leads you to everything that's happening... rise of nationalism, climate change, metoo movement, things like that. We're watching a big realignment right now. The old guard is being challenged."

Then he says the audience has changed. That it was largely white men reading Asimov and science fiction.

Putting this together, he's saying that instead of being about the fall of Empires and realigning social, military and technological orders his Foundation is about old white men being challenged as woke revolution ca.2020 political tokens. Then he criticizes people for calling the show woke.

From 40:00 -

He describes how Helicon will be presented in Season 2. Forget that it exists within the hazard area of a black hole accretion disk.

He wants Helicon and its moon to be so close that they share an atmosphere.

The reason he insisted on this against the advice of his science person is that it was "metaphorically significant".

So let's review:

1. Helicon and its moon share an atmosphere for metaphorically essential reasons. Let me guess: haves and have nots, but they all share the same air so they have to learn to give up their traditional social boundaries. One world. One love.
2. Hari, from Helicon, has baggage from his childhood. Let me guess, the moon features racist white separatists (Brexit, nationalism) who ignore the shared atmosphere (climate change). Hari was raised by them.
3. Hari's upbringing informs his math. So Psychohistory will fail because Hari forgot to make it racially, ethnically and sexually inclusive.
4. Asimov is irrelevant because his world is long gone, his ideas appealed to white men mostly exclusively, and now that the audience has changed, Asimov is good for the dustbin. Because Asimov's ideas are only good for white men in the 1940s.
5. Goyer's invocation of MeToo and MAGA is a much more compelling and appropriate expression of the core idea of Asimov's Foundation (apparently, realigning one order to a new order, that's Asimov's big idea). Goyer's decisions are based on the idea that 99% of Asimov's work beyond token plot points aren't relevant or worthwhile.

My post is not about the show. It's about Isaac Asimov.

Someone with this opinion about Asimov, his context and corpus, is being given millions of dollars to adapt one of Asimov's most important works.

Is David Goyer right about Asimov?