The government doesn't want any system of transmitting information to remain unbroken, unless it's under its own control. - Isaac Asimov

You must have minimalism because every change, any change, has myriad side effects that can't always be allowed for. If the change is too great and the side effects too many, then it becomes certain that the outcome will be far removed from anything you've planned and that it would be entirely unpredictable.

One might suppose that reality must be held to at all costs. However, though that may be the moral thing to do, it is not necessarily the most useful thing to do. The Greeks themselves chose the ideal over the real in their geometry and demonstrated very well that far more could be achieved by consideration of abstract line and form than by a study of the real lines and forms of the world; the greater understanding achieved through abstraction could be applied most usefully to the very reality that was ignored in the process of gaining knowledge.

To Baley, it seemed not that the Aurorans were growing more humane in their attitude out of a liking for the humane, but that they were denying the robotic nature of the objects in order to remove the discomfort of having to recognize the fact that the human beings were dependent upon objects of artificial intelligence.