Asimov’s Foundation series, which is fascinating because of the spoiler that you first need planetary scale populations to model the future, but then a mutant mule appears who can change behavior and must be opposed by Second Foundation operators leveraging his own emotions against him to get the project back on track

I could quote Luhmann on this as well, who thought that "without writing one cannot think," But there is nothing peculiarly "Luhmannian" about this idea. Isaac Asimov is said to have said "Writing to me is simply thinking through my fingers." And, to give one other example, E. B. White (of "Strunk and White" fame) claimed that "writing is one way to go about thinking." In other words, writing is thinking. And since I do almost all my significant writing in ConnectedText these days, it might be called my "writing environment."

Asimov, for the uninitiated, is one of the most important figures in science fiction and is often regarded as one of the “big three” authors, along with Robert A Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke. Together they helped bring about the so-called “golden age” of science fiction in the mid-20th century.

How do we reassert humanity’s moral compass over these alien algorithms? We may need to develop a version of Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” for algorithms.