Asimov's Psychohistory Becoming a Reality?

northernboy writes "Today's LA Times has an article describing how a Wikileaks data dump from Afghanistan plus some advanced algorithms are allowing accurate predictions about the behavior of large groups of people. From the article: 'The programmers used simple code to extract dates and locations from about 77,000 incident reports that detailed everything from simple stop-and-search operations to full-fledged battles. The resulting map revealed the outlines of the country's ongoing violence: hot spots near the Pakistani border but not near the Iranian border, and extensive bloodshed along the country's main highway. They did it all in just one night. Now one member of that group has teamed up with mathematicians and computer scientists and taken the project one major step further: They have used the WikiLeaks data to predict the future.' Considering they did not discriminate between types of skirmish, but only when and where there was violence, this seems like an amazing result. It looks like our robotic overlords will have even less trouble controlling us than I previously thought."

Comments

Obligatory TED reference

[Bananatree3]

Researcher Sean Gourley discussed "the mathematics of war"on TED already. Not a new phenomenon, but an interesting extension.

Re:Obligatory TED reference

[Taco Cowboy]

Quoting Asimov:

"... and so I assumed that the time would come when there would be a science in which things could be predicted on a probabilistic or statistical basis"

What Asimov talked about, had actually been researched by many - in a principle known as "group dynamics" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_dynamics

The LA Times TFA described is mere an extension - by tapping on the powerful computing ability that we have today, and by tapping on the enormous databases that are being gathered (and kept) by private/corporate/governmental agencies around the world, including Facebook, FBI, and so on
 

The full paper ...

[bwoneill]

for those who are interested. I'm looking forward to reading it this weekend.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/11/1203177109

Re:That is no prediction

[The Snowman]

The American Civil Was was about *more* than slavery, but it's ridiculous to say that it wasn't about slavery.

My U.S. History professor, who wrote a dissertation about the civil war, agrees but in a slightly different way. He said it was an economic war. It just so happened that the economics of the South were based on slave labor. So while Congressmen in both chambers of Congress from both sides of the Mason-Dixon line were debating economic strife, the underlying issue was that the South made their money on the backs of slaves, while the North made their money on the backs of poor lower-class workers who were exploited just as bad but were free to walk away from their jobs.

Nothing was good about either side in those times, but the North was slightly less bad.

Re:That is no prediction

[slew]

we were at the same time giving lots of money to England in their fight against Germany

IIRC lending, not giving. They had to pay it back, and they eventually did.

Better review your history on lend-lease. Basically the US (and Canada) gave stuff to England for token payments (e.g. giving England 50 destroyer in "exchange" for lease payments for new US base locations to be located in former British colonies). Then after the war was over, the US depreciated the value of the lend-lease items by 90% (because now they were "used") and allowed England to "buy" them at the depreciated value with a 2% loan stretched out over 50 years.

Eventually, the residual of lend-lease was "paid" back on these terms on Dec 2006. Of course England could have paid it back earlier, but a 2% loan was a good deal and they of course paid it back in 50 year inflated money value...

If that kind of loan would have been made to members of congress, I think many people would have called it a gift... (e.g., lend them a $1M house, depreciate it 90% in 4 years, give them the opportunity to buy it for $100K with a 2% 50 year loan) What would you call it?

I'm not saying we shouldn't have done it, just calling a spade a spade. That whole lend-lease fiction was just to do an end-around the isolationist republican congress. It wasn't reality...

Re:That is no prediction

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

Restrepo dude. Afghanistan has a culture of repelling invaders. As in, it is in their shared cultural heritage and defines them as a people. It should be one of the last reformed places on earth. They just want to be left alone.