The greatest fantasy of science fiction is to build an intelligence, powerful enough to solve the oldest problem of the universe - entropy, the gradual death of the universe towards a cold and meaningless silence. This fear has an origin. Rudolf Clausius (1860) and later Lord Kelvin (1862) formalised the second law of thermodynamics: the universe was not just old; it had an expiry date, and was moving irreversibly towards a static "heat death". Fiction absorbed it immediately. In 1895, HG Wells published his novel, The Time Machine, ending with a haunting image of a grisly crab scuttling alone on a dying beach at the end of the world. EM Forster's The Machine Stops (1909) doesn't talk about entropy rather of a civilisation that relies completely on AI. What's horrifying here is the machine fails not due to some cosmic force but from within due to the inability of its inhabitants to comprehend the whole system.

Between these ideas of a universe running down and a humanity that has handed its fate to a machine, what Isaac Asimov contributed........

© The Express Tribune