Get ready for a time when computers know our world - and our future - better than we do.
One of my favourite Isaac Asmiov stories, Franchise, imagines an election in which computing is sufficiently advanced for the preferences of an entire country to be predicted on the basis of just one voter’s actions.
We’re not quite at that stage yet. But we may be on the right path. For perhaps the greatest geek triumph of the 2012 presidential elections was the unlikely figure of statistician Nate Silver, whose FiveThirtyEight blog – which algorithmically assessed hundreds of polls based on their historical accuracy – managed to successfully predict the result in 50 out of 50 states.
His analysis – like every political story – divides opinion. To my mind, though, his work shines a light on a bigger story about our future relationship with technology, and in particular on a vision of progress where there’s an increasingly clear divide between those endeavours that can safely be left to humans, and those where machines and mathematics are preferable.
It’s something that is already happening. From automated explorations of Mars, the use of unmanned drone aircraft for reconnaissance and remote assassination, to the analysis of probabilities and prediction. We do what we’re best at, and leave the rest to the machines. Some things have ever been thus, but never has the story of human enhancement been quite so closely entwined with the story of human redundancy.
In Silver’s case, the people who may face immediate redundancy are those professional political pundits whose speculations saturate the media at election time – or at least replacement by suitably ideologically varied Silver-like figures next time around. In the longer term, though, the wholesale replacement of speculation with massively data-led science may be in order – not to mention the transformation of what it means to plan as well as to predict a political campaign.
The Obama team’s massive level of behind-the-scenes data crunching is well known: “we ran the election 66,000 times every night”, as a senior official put it to Time magazine, describing their simulation of swing state votes. What’s less knowable but far more important, though, is just how much of a role this played in shaping victory.