Asimov's Psychohistory Becoming a Reality? 291
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."
It can't be reality now that you published it. (Score:2, Interesting)
The first rule of Asimov's psychohistory is that you cannot tell the people you're monitoring that psychohistory exists. So publishing this has now invalidated the possiblity, showing yet another example of a headline that is a question to which the answer is, "no."
It's only temporary (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Macro versus Micro (Score:4, Interesting)
Not a prediction (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Butterfly effect. (Score:4, Interesting)
And there is no accounting in any of this for the actions of a dumbass Lance Corporal and his buddies inducing utter chaos into the system.
Scene: Djibouti near the Ethiopian Border. A bunch of Lance Corporal Marines and their CO.
"Stand watch here, and if anyone in Ethiopia comes over, you need to tell us and chase them back into Ethiopia. But under no circumstances are you to go into Ethiopia yourselves, not even if they're firing upon you. We mean it. Got that?"
"Sure thing"
Armed Ethiopians of doubtful allegiance cross the border into Djibouti
Lance corporals enthusiastically chase them back and cross into Ethiopia themselves while armed
Possible outcome that didn't happen:
"Daddy, what did you do in the Ethiopian War?"
"Our unit started it."
This may or may not be true. But I tell this story to make a point. Like a butterfly flapping its wings in the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone to trigger a hurricane, the action of a few dumbasses can trigger some serious shit. Since we're talking psychohistory here, Hari Seldon's Plan broke down under the chaos of the Mule. You can do all the modelling you want, but complex systems such as human societies and such, are prone to chaos introduced by small numbers of influential people, whether they know it or not and good luck trying to model *that* and predict on it.
--
BMO
Re:That is no prediction (Score:3, Interesting)
> On the gripping hand, what the fuck are we actually doing over there anyway?
We are enforcing Afghanistan's 1941 signing of the Declaration of Universal Right of Man. Hopefully by providing an environment where an alternative to the Taliban can establish power we will provide a lasting buffer against their tyranny.
For those who say it isn't our business to protect the rights of others, that line of thinking was invalidated by WWII and previously in the Civil war.
Re:It's only temporary (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:That is no prediction (Score:2, Interesting)
On the contrary, the civil war was about slavery. The "Preserve the Union"/"State's Rights" slogans were largely marketing BS designed to get people to sign up even when they didn't care to abolish slavery/defend rich-ass slaveholders.
The notion that the Confederacy was in favor of "State's Rights" is belied by the fact that among their earliest acts ratified was one that decreed that no state in the Confederacy would have the right to abolish slavery within its territory. The Confederacy defended slaveholders first and foremost.
Re:That is no prediction (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Butterfly effect. (Score:4, Interesting)
The Hunter-Seeker Algorithm (Score:4, Interesting)
"If I determine the enemy's disposition of forces while I have no perceptible form, I can concentrate my forces while the enemy is fragmented. The pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless. If it is formless, then even the deepest spy cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it." Sun Tzu, Art of War, Datalinks.
(Actual psychohistory, though, was supposed to predict events over a thousand years. Not happening.)
Re:That is no prediction (Score:4, Interesting)
the South made their money on the backs of slaves, while the North made their money on the backs of poor lower-class workers
And that made a big difference in the cultures and politics of the two; the South was focused on agriculture, mainly cotton, and failed to develop a diversified industry. Slavery also led to a more highly stratified society, where large slaveholders held a majority of the wealth and the middle class was much smaller and less powerful than in the North. One of the effects of the concentration of political power into the hands of the big plantation owners was the smaller government and lower levels of taxation in the South. Import tarrifs were also low, because Southern manufacturing was so backwards and oriented towards the needs of farmers that most of the industrial products had to be imported. As a result, the quality and availability of public education were low, leading to widespread illiteracy. Those trends produced a conservative society, oriented towards the past, with little interest in science or progress.
Thinking about it, It's surprising how many of those same differences between the (broadly defined) US North and South cultures are still there today.
Re:That is no prediction (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Other uses? (Score:5, Interesting)
I never understood why people believe it's okay to kill people as long as you "respect" their dead bodies afterward.