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

It's only temporary

[Narrowband]

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!)

Re:It's only temporary

[Robotbeat]

Sounds like algorithmic trading.

That's EXACTLY, EXACTLY what I was thinking. We've solved a lot of the secrets of the atom (and seemed to decide mostly as a society that we don't want to harness that power), the two great superpowers have essentially made peace (superpower defined as a great power that can project regional-great-power-level globally... something that China will not be capable of for decades, hemmed in as they are on all sides by powerful rivals), money for "big science" has started to dry up (partly because of "starve the beast" politics starving the US of greatness, partly by the fact the Cold War is over), and we've just found the Higgs, basically confirming the Standard Model. So, what do we do? Well, theoretical physicists turn out to be really good at modeling arcane, abstract things. They've been moving en masse (remember, they're still a tiny group compared to all the MBAs out there) into quantitative finance. A lot of technology that once went to building faster and faster supercomputers (such as interconnect technology similar to Infiniband) is now being used to reduce latencies for financial transactions, where nanoseconds matter.

And while I've often felt pretty skeptical (as a graduate student physicist myself) about the purpose of string theory, a theoretical physicist-turned quant said, "It turns out that string theory is useful in valuing mortgage backed securities."

Somewhat unlike physical laws, the nature of financial systems changes constantly, so you have to redo your models (not just the constants in your models, but the models themselves) quite often, meaning endless job security for these physicist quants. And we're talking about the world's economy, meaning the potential profits aren't marginal, like they might be for designing a slightly more efficient laser or semiconductor, but is literally all the liquid or semiliquid assets in the world. After the end of the Cold War, physicists have found a way to be indispensable again.

It's an arms race of quantitative finance going on out there. Personally, I think it's unsustainable and will eventually result in an enormous clampdown as we have more flash-crashes or something unforeseen, but even then, there will still be a market for quantitive finance as long as there is money.

Not a prediction

[Hentes]

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.

Psychohistory

[br00tus]

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.