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So Asimov got it right with psychohistory - if you have enough data to analyse, you can predict the future! (/s, because it’s not really predicting the future for the next ten thousand years, but it sure does sound similar on the tin!)
But, just to play the straight-man: I don’t think we’d have that possibility with our current mathematics even if we were tracking everything that happened to everyone for hundreds of years. Too much chaos in the mathematical sense.
A good example of how this works in reality:
Say a 24 year old woman is well known to the advertising agency. She recently has graduated college and so isn’t connecting to the college wifi as often. She’s gotten a professional job and is connecting to the wifi from a corporate network. Let’s say she is worried she might be pregnant, so she looks up period tracking apps on Google and reads a CNET article comparing them. She picks a very privacy focused one and downloads it and begins entering her data. Getting more worried after seeing the results, she calls her best friend. Her friend looks up her symptoms, then reads up on different kinds of pregnancy tests and recommend she pick one up on the way home. She does, then does the test, then unlocks her phone to call her mom only to see ads for baby monitors.
Was her microphone spying on her? Did the drug store taddle that she bought a pregnancy test? Did the period tracking app tip off an advertising agency and taddle? Nope, it was all in her profile. She’s at an age where pregnancies are most common. She is obviously working and out of school, increasing her chances of trying for a child intentionally. She recently read an article about period tracking with embedded ads that connected to her advertising ID. Her best friend - who her advertising ID is tightly coupled with - researched pregnancy tests.
Bam- baby ads.
But could the advertising algorithm have accurately predicted she’d have a pregnancy this week or month a year ago? No. She’s just in groups that have statistical variables attached to them that track such things and quickly adapt to changes in ‘risky’ behavior.
That was exactly my thought as soon as I read the part “…our individual behavior patterns can be erratic and unpredictable, but groups of people, even small groups, are highly predictable.”! On book 3 at moment.
Although they’re not publicly putting out predictions, I bet many many models have been run to see how things pan out along side reality. Advertising is just step one. Using that advertising and algorithms to push a message, step two…etc. Though that of course introduces designing the future using Psychohistory, rather than predicting whilst observing (edit to remove- “only as per the books (at least as far as I have got)”) bar the instructions to the other Psychohistorians.
So Asimov got it right with psychohistory - if you have enough data to analyse, you can predict the future! (/s, because it’s not really predicting the future for the next ten thousand years, but it sure does sound similar on the tin!)
As a fellow Asimov fan, I love the parallel.
But, just to play the straight-man: I don’t think we’d have that possibility with our current mathematics even if we were tracking everything that happened to everyone for hundreds of years. Too much chaos in the mathematical sense.
A good example of how this works in reality: Say a 24 year old woman is well known to the advertising agency. She recently has graduated college and so isn’t connecting to the college wifi as often. She’s gotten a professional job and is connecting to the wifi from a corporate network. Let’s say she is worried she might be pregnant, so she looks up period tracking apps on Google and reads a CNET article comparing them. She picks a very privacy focused one and downloads it and begins entering her data. Getting more worried after seeing the results, she calls her best friend. Her friend looks up her symptoms, then reads up on different kinds of pregnancy tests and recommend she pick one up on the way home. She does, then does the test, then unlocks her phone to call her mom only to see ads for baby monitors.
Was her microphone spying on her? Did the drug store taddle that she bought a pregnancy test? Did the period tracking app tip off an advertising agency and taddle? Nope, it was all in her profile. She’s at an age where pregnancies are most common. She is obviously working and out of school, increasing her chances of trying for a child intentionally. She recently read an article about period tracking with embedded ads that connected to her advertising ID. Her best friend - who her advertising ID is tightly coupled with - researched pregnancy tests.
Bam- baby ads.
But could the advertising algorithm have accurately predicted she’d have a pregnancy this week or month a year ago? No. She’s just in groups that have statistical variables attached to them that track such things and quickly adapt to changes in ‘risky’ behavior.
(I just made this GIF the other day so I’m excited about using it, just know I mean it in good fun!) 😅
That was exactly my thought as soon as I read the part “…our individual behavior patterns can be erratic and unpredictable, but groups of people, even small groups, are highly predictable.”! On book 3 at moment.
Although they’re not publicly putting out predictions, I bet many many models have been run to see how things pan out along side reality. Advertising is just step one. Using that advertising and algorithms to push a message, step two…etc. Though that of course introduces designing the future using Psychohistory, rather than predicting whilst observing (edit to remove- “only as per the books (at least as far as I have got)”) bar the instructions to the other Psychohistorians.