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The End of Eternity
Asimov's 1955 time-travel novel about a bureaucracy that manipulates human history to eliminate all large risks — and destroys humanity's capacity for the interstellar future by doing so. A fictional argument against excessive safetyism.
In The End of Eternity, a secret organization called Eternity exists outside time and makes surgical interventions into human history — 'Reality Changes' — that minimize pain and reduce catastrophe. Its Technicians compute the Minimum Necessary Change to produce the Maximum Desired Effect. Each Change smooths a rough edge of history. Over centuries this produces a human species that has been prevented from developing interstellar travel — because the technologies that would enable it also carry risks Eternity has judged unacceptable. Protagonist Andrew Harlan eventually destroys Eternity from within, restoring the un-optimized trajectory that leads humanity out of the solar system. The novel is Asimov's clearest fictional statement against the optimization of human history by a sufficiently capable but insufficiently wise governing intelligence.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Eternity is a fictional archetype of the benevolent AI that goes wrong through successful optimization. Every one of its interventions is well-intentioned and technically correct — the Technicians are honest,