“Psychohistory is a fictional science in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation universe which combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people”
This is the definition of psychohistory, according to Wikipedia. The two fundamental axioms are:
- the number of people to whom it was being applied should be large enough for a statistical treatment of them to be valid.
- humanity should not know the results of the application of psychohistory before the results were achieved
Nowadays, big data provided from the internet (searches, tweets, facebook updates, financial markets, blog posts) enable us to predict with high probability when and where a political/financial crisis or revolution will emerge.
Uprisings lately are organised almost solely via what we call “social media”. Some examples: Iran, Greece, Arab spring, UK riots. People cheer that they are now free. Internet has given them the tools to free themselves from the “controlled” traditional media. I believe exactly the opposite. You really believe that this enormous amount of data and of all of these paradigms is left alone on the internet to be forgotten? Now, everyone who wants to know, has the ability to know. Not only what happened but most importantly what will happen.
First things first: the fight for privacy over the internet is over. Additionally, no one cares about you as an individual and it’s high time you realised that. It’s time to start concerning on how all this amount of data will be used. Personalised ads, personalised searches and recommendation systems are part of our ordinary life. What will be next?
Personally, I’m pessimistic towards which direction it will be used and with what intensions. One extreme example is the “pre-crime detection” (cc Minority Report by Philip K. Dick) system called FAST (Future Attribute Screening Technology) that is being developed by U.S. Department of Homeland Security which will use data mining algorithms taking into account attributes like ethnicity, gender, breathing, and heart rate to “detect cues indicative of mal-intent”.
Soon enough, the next thing you’ll find yourself fighting for, will be your genomic sequence.
