Episode Details

Isaac Asimov wrote or edited over 500 books spanning nearly every category of the Dewey Decimal System. He was terrified of flying, never learned to swim, and spent most of his life in a small apartment in Manhattan typing at extraordinary speed on a manual typewriter.

This episode explores the paradox of a man who imagined galactic civilizations but rarely left his neighborhood, who wrote about robots with more empathy than he sometimes showed humans, and whose Three Laws of Robotics became the starting point for real-world AI ethics.

• He published over 500 books across science fiction, science, history, and literary criticism
• His Three Laws of Robotics influenced real-world discussions about artificial intelligence ethics
• He was afraid of flying and avoided it for nearly his entire adult life
• His Foundation series was voted the best science fiction series of all time by the World Science Fiction Convention