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Alex “Sandy” Pentland, an exponent of what he has termed “social physics,” is interested in building powerful human-AI ecologies. He is concerned at the same time about the potential dangers of decision-making systems in which the data in effect take over and human creativity is relegated to the background.

The advent of Big Data, he believes, has given us the opportunity to reinvent our civilization: “We can now begin to actually look at the details of social interaction and how those play out, and we’re no longer limited to averages like market indices or election results. This is an astounding change. The ability to see the details of the market, of political revolutions, and to be able to predict and control them is definitely a case of Promethean fire—it could be used for good or for ill. Big Data brings us to interesting times.”

At our group meeting in Washington, Connecticut, he confessed that reading Norbert Wiener on the concept of feedback “felt like reading my own thoughts.”

“After Wiener, people discovered or focused on the fact that there are genuinely chaotic systems that are just not predictable,” he said, “but if you look at human socioeconomic systems, there is a large percentage of variance you can account for and predict. . . . Today there is data from all sorts of digital devices, and from all of our transactions. The fact that everything is datafied means you can measure things in real time in most aspects of human life—and increasingly in every aspect of human life. The fact that we have interesting computers and machine-learning techniques means that you can build predictive models of human systems in ways you could never do before.”

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