I just finished reading the first book of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series – Foundation. In it, a man who specializes in the field of psycohistory – the prediction of human behavior en masse over long periods of time, not the study of any of a select group of Comfy Couch denizens – sets up conditions to shorten a Dark Age in human history to only a thousand years or so. Hari Seldon is his name, and manipulating all of mankind is his game. Sort of.
It’s late, so I couldn’t do much research on the topic of predicting human behavior. (I predict that I shall be going to bed very, very soon, however.) But I did find one interesting article from the UK Guardian on predicting human behavior and the risks thereof:
First, it’s use as a marketing tool is intriguing. Can a company predict when you’ll be ready to buy their product? Why yes, they want to try, anyway:
By classifying types of people and their behaviours on this basis, shops try to increase their profits by automatically targeting those of us in their databases that seem most likely to buy certain items. Insurance companies use similar methods to reduce fraud by investigating the claims of those whom the software decides are most likely to be lying.
And then the government wants to use it to analyze people. Gadzooks, just think what will happen – just look at the marvelous mess we have for our other major government programs!
“But the government is adopting such techniques for more serious matters. Software at the Department of Work and Pensions, for instance, is beginning to try to detect fraudsters by analysing the voices of people who ring its call centres…”
And they want to use it in their medical program as well:
The idea is to predict life outcomes and trigger early human interventions before things go wrong…even before birth. In this scheme, the unborn child of a pregnant mother might be categorised as at high risk of future criminality based on factors…The mother is then visited regularly at home by a nurse and helped with parenting.
And how about preventing crime?
In the criminal justice system too, risk prediction instruments assess the probability of adults and young people re-offending, along with a battery of other actuarial tests for predicting future sexual and violent crime. Such techniques…play a central role in evaluations to determine whether a person should be committed indefinitely as a dangerous person with severe personality disorder or whether these people, once committed, are ready for release.
That smacks a little of the movie, Minority Report.
Each day, we see the science fiction “future” written years ago coming to life before our eyes. We are talking about travel to Mars, mining asteroids, and living under the sea. We have handheld devices which allow us to communicate all over the world, and those same devices retrieve data for us on verbal request. We have vehicles which fly through the air and under the ocean. There is atomic power and bionic limbs. Doctors are working on implants which restore eyesight to the blind. We replace various organs as an accepted matter of course. Computers play chess, and human made satellites graze the edges of our solar system, heading out into the cold, endless, interstellar space. How far behind are we?
With such once-upon-a-time futuristic endeavors becoming so commonplace, could predicting human behavior become a fact? How will that affect our society? Will there be riots and resistance, or will the upcoming generations accept it as part of their sophisticated lives? What power will it give government? What kind of underground will it foster? How will it affect religion, and the use thereof? Politics? International relations?
Truly troubling: How much of this is already happening?
And will our lives become boring? What effect will being predictable have on our psyche? And can the powers-that-be take that into account as well – making us doubly predictable?
Deep thoughts for the last day of the week.