I think Asimov encountered such ideas (pretty much inevitable on any university campus), but he never took them that seriously. And Marx himself lived long enough to point out he himself was not a Marxist! Marx and Engels themselves were influenced by Hegel. Marxists don't pretend to tell you what today's lottery results will be, but they will continually tell you what they think is about to happen on the macroscale and how to get there. (Plato's Philosopher Kings were also, like Seldon, there as an elite to influence the direction of society without much public involvement.)

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.