Slashdot Mirror
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."
Even in Asimov's world, psychohistory only works on groups that don't practice psychohistory themselves. Harry Seldon only kept things from going off the rails by making the science die out, and by starting a Second Foundation of telepaths.
Once someone starts making predictions from data aggregation more effective, the race will be on to duplicate or improve on it, and then nobody's prediction algorithms will work.
Almost sounds like someone should write a dystopian Foundation book, where the mathematicians race to predict each others' predictive abilities (and of course, stop them!)
The concept was fascinating and original, but flawed. Asimov based psychohistory on thermodynamics, not chaos theory. Greg Bear tossed around a lot of technobabble in "Foundation and Chaos" but his understanding of the underlying theory was as simplistic as George Lucas and his "good force/dark force" dualism. If Asimov hadn't have contracted HIV from that blood transfusion, he would have had Seldon (in yet another prequel) speak of the Second Empire as a strange attractor, without focusing on the details that led up to it.
This is model building, not prediction. They tried to find a model that can calculate the events of 2010 based on data from 2009. This may sound like prediction, but the important thing is that the researchers started this after the events the model "predicted" happened. Thus, they were able to tweak their models to fit reality. This is not a bad thing, that's how you create working models, but a prediction is a statement about things in the future. They only made predictions now that they have published their results, and whether they are right or not remains to be seen.
Most modern Americans are unaware of the worldwide ideological debates of the early 20th century, and thus they miss the boat on what psychohistory obviously is. From a variety of things, including knowing Asimov's involvement with the Futurians in the 1930s, it's obvious that psychohistory is a parody of the Marxist conception of historical materialism. In fact, to anyone familiar with Marxian historical materialism, it is incredibly easy to see that this is what is made reference to by psychohistory in the book - although in the book the technique has been further developed. I've always felt the Mule was a reference to charismatic leaders like Hitler and Mussolini - ugly at close view, but with the ability to persuade large masses of people nonetheless, something which Marx did not foresee. That's just my interpretation though, it's not completely clear. I think that Hari Seldon is a Karl Marx figure is even more of a sure bet than the Mule possibility. To people who don't know the ideas of the Futurians, or the ideological ideas within the milieu of left-wing Jewish intellectual circles in New York City in the 1930s, I think it is easy to miss a lot of the references being made.
Working in crappy factories where injuries were common, to include losing digits, limbs, etc., yeah. Where if you quit, the only other jobs were just as bad. Sure, slaves had to deal with stuff like being whipped, raped, etc. but the living conditions of a slave were comparable to the Northern working class, and the hope of changing one's situation was equally as abysmal. Meanwhile, the crime and other crap the working class in the North dealt with (including beatings, rape, etc) were almost as bad.
Slavery is evil and was never good. My point is the plight of a non-slave working class in that time was almost as bad. Look at the whole picture: not just the employer/slavedriver, but where did those people live? What did they deal with on a daily basis?
Makes me grateful that the worst I deal with is my tendonitis and the risk of CTS.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
At the start of WWII, the alliance system that caused The Great War and the monstrous and pointless slaughter that went on during it were still very much fresh on everyone's mind. That was why Neville Chamberlain let Hitler get away with as much as he did in the 1930s (That and that Britain couldn't afford another war either). That was why the US retreated into an isolationist/protectionist shell. America is an impregnable fortress - we have two entire oceans between us and any plausible invader - why should we send our boys to die in a European fight? Not sending them into fights that aren't ours is rather the popular meme these days as I understand it.
I'm also curious how you conclude that the US only showed up after the Soviets had won the war. Seeing as the US declared war on all the Axis powers in early December of 1941, at which time Soviet forces were in full retreat, and the decisive turning point in the Eastern front - the Battle of Stalingrad - didn't even begin until late summer 1942.
I also question how you conclude that Japan could barely challenge the US, when the Pacific Theater (which, if I might remind you, the US that contributed "very little to the defeat of the Axis" fought essentially its own while simultaneously fighting and/or arming two others in North Africa and Europe) began with the US Pacific Fleet getting sucker-punched and suffering defeat after defeat for over a year. Yes, for many reasons it's certainly true that for Imperial Japan to start a war with the US was a suicidal proposition in the long term, but you dishonor the memory of all the men who died fighting towards the home islands to say they were barely challenged.
And the war was most certainly not practically won - The Imperial Japanese Army's own internal documents say they were ready to send every person in their entire nation to die fighting, and not until the US demonstrated unequivocally that we could now grant that suicidal wish and not lose a single man doing it did they surrender (unconditionally surrender - Japanese has about a dozen ways to yes and no without actually saying yes and no). Our own generals were forecasting literally millions of dead (to say nothing of casualties) if we finished the island hopping strategy and invaded the Home Islands conventionally.
Was the Axis doomed much sooner by Hitler's strategic incompetence? I'll let Operation Barbarossa speak to that, along with several other potentially critical decision points that shouldn't have gone in Allied favor (like the decision not to release Panzers at Normandy because the Fuhrer was asleep and not to be disturbed). Was America's industrial and manpower committment to the war a footnote? Not on your life.
I never understood why people believe it's okay to kill people as long as you "respect" their dead bodies afterward.
no taxation without representation!