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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."
In the absence of change in circumstances, it is quite obvious that areas of conflict will have more conflict. TFA doesn't say enough about the methodology for one to be able to estimate how valuable it is.
On the other hand, yet another good thing about the Wikileak emerges. Were those data hidden by the secrecy wall, this research would not have been available to the NATO forces over there. Is secrecy really productive? Was the leak good or bad? Are the costly measures to make future leaks less likely a good investment?
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!)
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.
for those who are interested. I'm looking forward to reading it this weekend.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/11/1203177109
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.
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
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I read the Foundation Trilogy about 40 years ago and have been terrified ever since that this type of technology would be used in marketing. Thank goodness we're only using it in war.
And in the countries the US hasn't gotten to yet, they just stone women who've been raped for adultery, sell daughters into marriage and generally work against any sort of progress.
From Wikipedia:
Current dowry practices
#India
#Bangladesh
#Pakistan
#Nepal
#Afghanistan
#Vietnam
Good luck with getting through that list. Are they starting their way from the bottom and working upwards? Perhaps should have ticked the bottom one off before moving to the next one.