Without going out of your door, you can know the ways of the world. Without peeping through your window, you can see the Way of Heaven. The farther you go, the less you know. Thus, the Sage knows without traveling, sees without looking, and achieves without struggle. — Lao Tse

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov — © 1956

The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way:

Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. As well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face — miles and miles of face — of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole.

Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting. It had to be, for nothing human could adjust and correct it quickly enough or even adequately enough — so Adell and Lupov attended the monstrous giant only lightly and superficially, yet as well as any men could. They fed it data, adjusted questions to its needs and translated the answers that were issued. Certainly they, and all others like them, were fully entitled to share in the glory that was Multivac’s.

For decades, Multivac had helped design the ships and plot the trajectories that enabled man to reach the Moon, Mars, and Venus, but past that, Earth’s poor resources could not support the ships. Too much energy was needed for the long trips. Earth exploited its coal and uranium with increasing efficiency, but there was only so much of both.

But slowly Multivac learned enough to answer deeper questions more fundamentally, and on May 14, 2061, what had been theory, became fact.

The energy of the sun was stored, converted, and utilized directly on a planet-wide scale. All Earth turned off its burning coal, its fissioning uranium, and flipped the switch that connected all of it to a small station, one mile in diameter, circling the Earth at half the distance of the Moon. All Earth ran by invisible beams of sunpower.

Seven days had not sufficed to dim the glory of it and Adell and Lupov finally managed to escape from the public function, and to meet in quiet where no one would think of looking for them, in the deserted underground chambers, where portions of the mighty buried body of Multivac showed. Unattended, idling, sorting data with contented lazy clickings, Multivac, too, had earned its vacation and the boys appreciated that. They had no intention, originally, of disturbing it.

They had brought a bottle with them, and their only concern at the moment was to relax in the company of each other and the bottle.

“It’s amazing when you think of it,” said Adell. His broad face had lines of weariness in it, and he stirred his drink slowly with a glass rod, watching the cubes of ice slur clumsily about. “All the energy we can possibly ever use for free. Enough energy, if we wanted to draw on it, to melt all Earth into a big drop of impure liquid iron, and still never miss the energy so used. All the energy we could ever use, forever and forever and forever.”

Lupov cocked his head sideways. He had a trick of doing that when he wanted to be contrary, and he wanted to be contrary now, partly because he had had to carry the ice and glassware. “Not forever,” he said.

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Wu-wei is the principle of non-action. It is an integral part of Taoist philosophy and is a non-dualistic form of action; by choosing to not act, the Tao, or energy of the cosmos, flows unimpeded through you. This is a good state to be in. And this is why wu-wei is so important. One can be both true to his or her own nature and allow things to balance out accordingly, in their own time. This state of effortless equilibrium aligns the self with everything there is and hence opens pathways to new learning and joy.

Begin.

From the University of Utah with an intuitive format. Try it!

It’s all newness. It’s all new.
Every letter of this sentence.
Every breath inhaled – what of any of this has happened before?

And is this significant?
Yes. But only when lived as newness.

When newness itself is lived it all gains meaning;
it all has to be new, because nothing is allowed to be old.
And yet our all-too-powerful brains jump to nonexistent past and future times,
all unreal, jumping simply because they can.

Whatever you have to do, make it real,
cause there’s no time but this one – and it’s never happened before.
And as soon as it’s over,
it didn’t.

So put that in your pipe and smoke it:

Kodama of Gaia

Atokirina of Eywa

From the movies Princess Mononoke and Avatar.

( Individually )

If you would not be forgotten,
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worthy reading,
Or do things worth the writing.

( Equitably )

The constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness.
You have to catch it yourself.

~ Benjamin Franklin ~

( Absolutely )

He is able who thinks he is able.

( Increasingly )

A jug fills drop by drop.

~ Siddhārtha Gautama ~

With increasingly subtle moves, the players in Asimov’s epic Foundation and Earth are confronted with the daunting decision of whether to initiate an all-encompassing ethical framework, one which just might direct humanity into an acceptable future. The agents of change go unnamed for those who have yet to read it.

Dr. Isaac Asimov, in his Foundation series (also iRobot), first places these principles:
(Wording slightly adjusted for clarity. See the original if you wish.)

1. A robot may not harm a human, or, by inaction, allow a human to come to harm.
2. A robot may not disobey human commands, except when doing so would prevent greater harm to a human.
3. A robot may not allow itself to come to harm, except when doing so would prevent greater harm to a human.

The Zeroth Law (0th) is added by another powerful mind (still some 20,000 years before the grand finale):

• A robot may not harm humanity, or by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
• A robot may not harm a human, or, by inaction, allow a human to come to harm, except when doing so would prevent greater harm to humanity.
• A robot may not disobey human commands unless required to in order to prevent harm to a human, except when doing so would prevent greater harm to humanity.
• A robot may not allow itself to come to harm unless required to in order to prevent harm to a human, except when doing so would prevent greater harm to humanity.

The Zeroth Law really puts everything into perspective, adding a new level of consideration and calculation; within this framework, every thought, word, and action for robot-kind needs exquisite justification. In Foundation and Earth, we see just how much extra crunching is necessary, evident in the many hardware updates Daneel Olivaw has to go through to keep up with the data produced by a galactic human civilization at a very tenuous place in history. So as not to spoil this epic 7-book series (by my count), I will just give you a recommended reading order, one which allows for ‘optimal absorption of foundational elements’ and also a thorough understanding of the elegantly intricate possible-future-history of humanity that Asimov has created. Here follows what should trump every other sci-fi reading list you may currently have:

1. Foundation (1951)
2. Foundation and Empire (1952)
3. Second Foundation (1953)
4. Prelude to Foundation (1988)   [prequel 1]
5. Forward the Foundation (1993)   [prequel 2]
6. Foundation’s Edge (1982)   [epilogue 1]
7. Foundation and Earth (1986)   [epilogue 2]

How did you read this series? Please let me hear your voice!

Also: An updated version of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics has been drafted for approval in Japan to govern the actions of robots in the near-future.