“I suspect that if I were to re-read his Foundation books, I would seem them in a new light. “Guiding” humanity along sounds socialistic to me now.”
Yep. I discovered Asimov when I was a teenager and enamored of centralized world government and social engineering ideas. I read the last of his foundation books when I was in my 20s and had taken a much more libertarian way of thinking and was a lot less enthralled by his vision of the future.
There is a new cult-like philosophy called Longtermism/Effective Altruism that is similar and very popular among tech tycoons.
It mixes in a lot of words about goodness, but what it boils down to is that they are the smartest and therefore must have absolute power over humanity.
That fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was one of the disciples. Elon Musk is also involved in these circles.
Here is one article describing it - https://netzpolitik.org/2023/longtermism-an-odd-and-peculiar-ideology/