But we do see power structures actively trying to anticipate the future and navigate it... with limited input from the general public.
Their Asimov was probably Verne, which already was trying to predict the future before them.
Around Verne's time (and a little later too), it was the 1889 Paris Exibition, the invention of the airplane, telegraph, lightbulb. Those were worldwide phenomena.
Asimov (and others of his time) probably read all of that. He then saw the "new science": computers, space, the atom, and wrote about those.
I also believe the great recession contributed to a certain degree of awareness not to be too optimistic.
It seems very obvious for me to trace the pedigree of this futurism to those references, it's all over his writing. Foundation reminisces about a lot of those ideas.
Also, it seems very obvious that politicians and regimes of all kinds used the public excitement with science as a populist move, not the other way around. Those ideas never came from them.
You are right about politics and science. One uses the other. Politicians tend to use emotional rather than logical arguments to persuade people.
If Asimov wanted to give a good impression about exact predictive science, he made some terrible mistakes:
- In his story, Hari Seldom predictions failed a lot. They had to be amended, fixed and tweaked several times by other characters.
- The predictions sound powerful, but also implied an unavoidable series of crisis. Not the best story to push your propaganda.
- The Mule is overall more powerful than Seldom, and actually achieves a stabilization of Empire's ruins. Not what you write if you want to make sure your idea is the only path forward.
These make me believe he was more interested in portraying those ideas with healthy doses of skepticism, not pushing them willy-nilly.
Governments and global businesses certainly do try and use futurologists and influence the direction of future society through techniques such as "psychological nudging" and control of information etc. The most obvious is climate modelling, where they try and project what climate change will do and how to deal with it. The roll out of AI in the early 2020s reeks of a planned PR operation, although the results have not always been what was expected. The design of the Covid lockdowns was the result of strategic planning from tabletop wargaming exercises for various pandemic scenarios, also producing mixed results.