Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Understanding Social Interactions is Difficult

To begin with, we don’t have a good theory of social behavior from which to start.
—David Weinberger, discussing the difficulties of taking enormous amounts of data and and using it to predict the future of the world.  December, 2011. “The Machine That Would Predict The Future.”  Scientific American.  Pages 52-57.
On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in the small Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, set himself on fire in a protest against the local culture of corruption.  That singular act set into motion a popular revolution that burned across the Arab world, leading to uprisings that overthrew decades of dictatorial rule in Egypt, Libya, and beyond, upending forever the balance of power in the world’s most oil-rich region.
What model would have been able to foresee this?
—David Weinberger.  December, 2011. “The Machine That Would Predict The Future.”  Scientific American.  Pages 52-57.


Blog Archive