Every book in the Orange Pill Cycle is a sustained study of a single thinker. This wiki is the lattice that connects them — entries on the concepts, technologies, people, works, and events that recur across the cycle. Use it as a map: every cross-reference in a book leads here; every entry here leads back to the books where the thinker, idea, or artifact is taken up at length.
Asimov's 1942 hierarchy of behavioral constraints — and its structural insufficiency.
The supervening rule that turned Asimov's robots into philosopher-kings.
Asimov's fictional science of predicting civilizations — partially testable in the LLM era.
The central unsolved problem: making powerful AI pursue the goals we actually endorse.
Asimov's designed, inspectable computing substrate — the opposite of real neural networks.
Asimov's singular, canonical supercomputer — ancestor of every question-answering AI.
Neural networks trained on internet-scale text — the technology at the center of the Cycle.
The editor of Astounding — co-architect of the Three Laws and mentor to the Golden Age.
Organizer of the Dartmouth Workshop, coiner of "artificial intelligence", inventor of Lisp.
Founder of information theory; the intellectual ancestor of every neural network.
Founder of cybernetics; first to articulate what is now called the alignment problem.
The fictional founder of psychohistory — archetype of the civilizational planner.
Campbell's magazine — the first venue of the Three Laws, Foundation, and most Golden Age sci-fi.
Where the phrase "artificial intelligence" was coined and the field, as a discipline, began.