1. Why this blog?


Isaac Asimov wrote in his Foundation series about ”psychohistory” – the science of accurately predicting the future with the help of history, sociology and mathematics. With this blog I want to start the philosphical ground work that is needed to do this in real life.

Where psychohistory uses equations that describe large populations, I suggest an approach more akin to the finite element method, with individuals as the elements. Then the critical thing will be to realistically quantify people's different motivations, fears, limitations and so on. From that, the big picture will emerge by itself.

It's easy to see how useful it would be to be able to make realistic simulations of groups of people or even whole societies.

* We could study group dynamics, e.g. to select the best combination of colonists to go to Mars.

* We could better understand key moments in our history by simulating them.

* We could access the ”wisdom of the crowd” for different problems.

* We could explore if different ideologies or political systems naturally arises from different distributions of personality traits.

* We could test how new laws, policies and reforms affect a society, before we implement them.

* We could see what kind of society is the most stable and resilient when facing for example pandemics or conflicts.

If politicians realised what a useful tool this could be, they would fund a Manhattan Project to develop it, but I doubt that will happen. It's more likely that a forward-thinking company, like Google, will take a stab at it.

Societies would be easy to simulate if it weren't for the people. They mess everything up with their inscrutable decision making. Is the theory behind this depending on people not having a free will? No - I believe in the free will (that's not a debate for this blog though) - but it's possible to replicate free will to a sufficient degree.

There have been many attempts to do this for very limited populations, but I think the goal should be to eventually simulate whole nations and add them to make up the whole world.

You might question if the complexity of that wouldn't overwhelm even the most powerful computers. But there are those who seriously believe that in the future, humanity will be able to simulate the world in such detail that the individual characters in these simulations will gain consciousness. What I suggest wouldn't require a trillionth of that kind of computer power.


What to come?

In this blog, I hope to investigate at least following topics:

1. Where to start?

2. How do you simulate an individual interacting with other individuals?

3. How do you build a society of these individuals?

4. How do you train the model and introduce historical data?

5. What limits our ability to predict the future?

6. Would very effective models be a democratic problem?

7. Is there an optimal political and financial system?

8. Will this kind of simulation turn into an Artificial General Intelligence?

I invite others to comment and contribute to this endeavour with their ideas and insights.


Comments

  1. AnonymousSunday, September 06, 2020 11:02:00 AM

    I don't think it's possible. Too many variables. But I will follow your blog.

    ReplyDelete

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