CONCEPT
Seldon Plan
The millennium-long program of institutional engineering at the heart of the Foundation cycle, designed by Hari Seldon to compress a Galactic dark age from thirty thousand years to one thousand. The fictional prototype for long-horizon civilizational-risk governance.
The Seldon Plan is the concrete output of psychohistorical analysis. Seldon foresees the coming collapse of the Galactic Empire but calculates that the resulting dark age can be shortened by positioning two Foundations — one of scientists and engineers, one of mental scientists — at strategic points in the galaxy. The Foundations do not lead; they are positioned so that the aggregate statistical forces Seldon modeled will produce the desired trajectory. Their decisions at crisis points are, in Seldon's model, already decided by the structure of the situation. The Plan encodes this trajectory as a series of "Seldon crises" at which only one path forward is viable.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Plan's internal elegance is that it shifts the locus of decision-making from the human actors to the structure of the situation. Individual Foundationers do not need to be especially wise or brave — Seldon has arranged things so that even mediocre choices will