I was born in 1955 — right in the middle of the era when science fiction was reshaping the imagination of an entire generation. By the early 1960s, when I was old enough to start pulling books from library shelves on my own, I was already devouring anything I could get my hands on. But nothing hit me like Isaac Asimov.
I didn’t just read Asimov. I grew up with him.
I grew up through him.
His books were everywhere — on spinner racks, in dusty libraries, in my hands at night when I should’ve been asleep. And even as a kid, I could sense that Asimov wasn’t writing just about robots and rockets. He was writing about thinking. About ethics. About human choices in the face of new intelligence.
He was telling kids like me:
The future isn’t something you wait for — it’s something you help build.
A 35-Year-Old Writer Paying Tribute
Fast-forward to 1990. I was 35 when my first short story was published. I titled it “In Memory, Yet Crystal Clear,” a deliberate homage to Asimov’s autobiography In Memory Yet Green.
That title wasn’t a wink — it was gratitude.
Asimov helped shape my sense of story, my sense of possibility, and my belief that science fiction was more than entertainment. It was philosophy disguised as narrative. It was a way of thinking about people, machines, society, and responsibility before those conversations became real.
When you’re 10 years old reading Asimov, you don’t think you’re preparing for adulthood.
But you are.
Rediscovering Asimov Through My Son
Recently, my son sent me a video — “What Happens If AI Just Keeps Getting Smarter?” — which dug into several Asimov short stories I somehow missed as a youth. It was surreal to watch.
Here I was, nearly 70, revisiting the same imaginative terrain that shaped me as a boy — but now from a world where AI isn’t theoretical. It’s here. It’s growing. It’s accelerating.
And suddenly the distance between a 1960s kid reading Asimov and the world of 2025 doesn’t feel as far as it once did.
Asimov Saw Further Than We Realized
Asimov imagined robots not as monsters but as partners.
Not as threats but as moral puzzles.
Not as fantasy but as inevitabilities.
His “Three Laws of Robotics” became the first mainstream attempt to wrap machine intelligence inside a moral framework. Even then, he knew the laws would fail — and half his stories are about those failures.
But he also assumed something beautiful:
that humans would care enough to try.
He believed we would approach intelligence — even artificial intelligence — with thoughtfulness, structure, and humility.
Today?
We have brilliant developers and researchers…but we also have corporations racing each other, governments barely understanding what they’re regulating, and a society catching up to technologies released at breakneck speed.
Asimov’s optimism wasn’t naïve.
It was aspirational.
The Questions Asimov Asked — And That AI Forces Us to Answer
The video my son sent me raised the same unsettling ideas Asimov was wrestling with decades before AI became real:
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What happens when intelligence grows faster than our ability to understand it?
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What happens when machines become better than us at the very things that define us?
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What happens when decisions move beyond human comprehension?
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And — critically — what happens when we fail to build the equivalent of “Three Laws” into real systems?
Asimov used fiction to explore these questions safely.
We’re having to explore them in real time.
Where My Childhood Meets the Future
It’s strange — and a little poetic — to be a writer who grew up on Asimov, wrote a story in 1990 as a tribute to him, and now lives in a world where AI is no longer a distant speculation but a daily presence. I can have conversations with AI systems today that feel like stepping into one of his stories.
The difference is that this time the story is ours.
And that makes the stakes real.
Asimov taught an entire generation that intelligence — human or artificial — is something we guide, shape, and take responsibility for. He believed in rationality, ethics, curiosity, and the possibility that science could improve the human condition if we approached it wisely.
That message feels more urgent now than it did in 1960, or in 1990 when I published that first story.
A Final Thought: Staying Asimovian
If there’s one thing I’ve taken from a lifetime of reading Asimov — and from watching these modern debates about AI — it’s this:
Asimov trusted us to be worthy of what we create.
The real question is whether we trust ourselves.
We don’t need to fear intelligence.
We need to fear carelessness, short-term thinking, and moral laziness — the opposite of what Asimov spent his life warning us about.
And as someone who was shaped by Asimov’s words as a boy, carried them into my own writing at 35, and now watches AI become smarter by the month… I hope we choose the Asimovian path:
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curiosity over panic
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ethics over profit
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imagination over stagnation
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and humanity over fear
Because the future won’t be written by machines.
It will be written by the people who decide what those machines become.
And Asimov — if he were still here — would remind us that the future is always, always a human responsibility.
I highly recommend watching the video, I think he did a very good job on it.
Cheers! Sláinte! Na zdravie!
