Scientists Say Asimov Put the Stars in Their Eyes : * Legacy: His writings inspired many to careers in space, technology by making the fantastic seem possible. ‘I remember reading the first robot stories and deciding I was going to build them,’ one MIT scholar recalls.
If you ask him what he does, artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky will tell you that he is a robot psychologist. Or maybe a roboticist. The MIT computer scientist is quite serious about these designations and proud of his relationship with the man who invented them, Isaac Asimov.
Minsky says these professions didn’t exist until they appeared in the works of Asimov, the science and science fiction author who died Monday in New York.
Minsky, who says Asimov was his childhood inspiration and later a friend, has been described as the closest living approximation to one of the author’s most enduring fictional characters, robot shrink Susan Calvin, whose job was to deal with the behavioral problems of robots. Indeed, had Minsky not encountered the robot stories in the pages of John Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction magazine during the early ‘40s, the struggling field of artificial intelligence might well have been deprived of one of its leading lights.
“I remember reading the first robot stories and deciding I was going to build them,” recalls Minsky, 62. “His stories asked how you could possibly impart common sense to a machine, which is something I have spent my life at.”
Minsky was not alone in being thus inspired. Stanley Schmidt, a physicist who now edits Astounding’s daughter magazine, Analog, says Asimov once told him that at least half of the creative scientists he had ever encountered attributed their careers to an early exposure to science fiction.
“I haven’t seen anyone do the hard research,” he says, “but I’ve known quite a few scientists myself, and I think I would agree with that estimate. People like Asimov and Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury wrote about things that sounded fantastic but somehow convinced kids like me that they were possible. The existence of the space program goes back to the fact that they were planting the idea in the heads of a bunch of bright kids that, hey, we could be doing this.”
Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer George Carlysle, 39, was one of those kids. And of the titans of the genre, Asimov appealed to him most.
“As an 11-year-old reading books like the ‘Foundation’ trilogy,” he says, “I was just agog at the possibilities. I was particularly attracted to Asimov’s belief that a rational techno-culture would arise to give the world direction and save us from chaos and irrationality. It was very compelling to a mere youth not entirely familiar with how irrationality might be as much a part of human nature as the desire to learn more about science.”
He was a biochemist by training, but it was as a science fiction writer that Asimov was most widely revered, and as he preferred to think of himself. Asimov’s rationalist spin on robot behavior and his transfer of Edward Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” to the pan-galactic arena of “Foundation” (replete with the predictive pseudo-science of “psychohistory” which, according to Schmidt, now appears to be actually emerging as a real science) virtually revolutionized early pulp science fiction. “No one can write SF today without having been touched by his ‘Foundation’ series,” says novelist Greg Bear.
With about 500 books published, Asimov was a remarkably effective explainer of science in nonfiction as well as in his stories. Peter Nicholls, Australian-based editor of “The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction” and “The Science in Science Fiction,” believes Asimov was “a greater science journalist than he was an SF writer--possibly the best of the lot.”
New York-based novelist Ben Bova concurs, who believes that Asimov “has done more to educate Americans about science than our entire school system from coast to coast.”
According to Bova, Asimov’s true genius was his ability to “take any subject under the sun and write about it so clearly and so simply that anybody who could read could understand it.”
“His role as an explainer was colossal,” says MIT’s Minsky. “His explanations were always right and to the point. He talked to everyone at every age, and he was unpretentious. If you look at other science popularizers like (Harvard paleontologist) Steven Jay Gould or even (Cornell astronomer) Carl Sagan, you get a lesson in English. It’s wonderful to read or hear them talk because you’re always learning new words and styles. But when you listened to Asimov . . . he’d just be telling you something.”
Despite his profound effect on generations of American scientists, Asimov was oddly reluctant to stand face to face with the fruits of his imagination. Minsky recalls his own unsuccessful efforts to introduce Asimov to some actual robots he had constructed during the early ‘60s. Asimov demurred for close to a decade, arguing that to encounter robots at so formative a stage in their evolution would be depressing.
“He said, ‘Well, if I came and looked at them I’d be stuck in the past.’ I thought it was very wise of him to recognize that if you look at something in its early stages, it’s going to pull you down rather than up,” Minsky says.
Robert Cesarone, the assistant program manager of JPL’s Deep Space Network strategy and development team, says that he’ll be busy catching up on Asimov’s prolific output. Cesarone, 39, has been reading SF for many years, but for some reason never got around to Asimov.
“About three or four years ago, I decided that I really ought to read the ‘Foundation’ series if I wanted to call myself a fan,” he says. “I embarked on this, thinking this probably wouldn’t be that good. Boy was I wrong. It was perhaps the best SF I had ever read, and it boasted one of the greatest characters ever invented in literature--a total despot whom you feel sympathy for.”
“I can’t think of anyone else who could be as inspirational,” says JPL’s Carlysle. “Maybe it’s something unique about the time, the postwar era, when even in the shadow of the nuclear mushroom cloud, people were convinced somehow that science and technology would lead us out of the wilderness.
“Asimov could appeal to a faith in the rational structure of things that can’t be appealed to so readily today,” he says. “We’ve grown more jaded and cynical, and for good reason. There’s a feeling a lot of this promise has also come at great cost. I think he represents an era that was a little more naive. But I hate the thought that in the process of becoming more worldly and wise about the limitations of our technology and science, that we have exchanged it for complete cynicism about the future.”
