Asimov's Foundation and the next big thing
by
Charlie Bess
I was at a Burn’s supper this week in Scotland and the person sitting next to me attended one of the presentation sessions EDS did where we were talking about earlier in the week. We were talking about the next big thing in IT. My presentation was around event stream processing and how unique may be where the value is.
He said that the slides around “normal” systems and pattern matching and managing behavior reminded him of the Asimov book series The Foundation. At that moment I knew he understood what I was talking about. If only Hari Seldon could have had the flexibility in his system to incorporate “the mule” as an anomaly and enabled the people to actively decided whether it was good or bad, instead of passively going down the normal route, the psychohistory would have had much greater value.
This is one of the better analogies of how planning for constant rather than change may be a futile exercise.
