FICTIONAL FIGURE
Hari Seldon
Asimov's founder of psychohistory and the Foundations — the fictional architect of a thousand-year plan to shorten a Galactic interregnum from thirty thousand years to one. Contemporary analogue: the long-termist institutional designer working on AI-era civilizational risk.
Hari Seldon is the mathematician-historian who, in Asimov's Foundation cycle, develops psychohistory — a statistical science of predicting large-population behavior — and uses it to design the Seldon Plan, a millennium-long intervention intended to reduce the duration of a coming dark age from thirty thousand years to one thousand. He dies before the interregnum begins, but his plan — encoded in institutions, in pre-recorded speeches released at crisis points, in the structure of the two Foundations he founds — guides civilization for centuries after his death. He is Asimov's fullest portrait of civilizational intelligence: an individual mind acting across timescales far longer than the individual.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Seldon's work presupposes that individual human behavior is unpredictable but that the aggregate behavior of quintillions of humans is tractable statistically — the analog of ideal-gas laws for civilization. This premise is taken seriously enough in the books that the entire Foundation's