Comment AFP VIA GETTY Protests Against Racism in Detroit, Michigan, and Many Other US Cities in 1967 Prompted Attempts to Forecast Future Demonstrations
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Setting the agenda in research Comment AFP VIA GETTY Protests against racism in Detroit, Michigan, and many other US cities in 1967 prompted attempts to forecast future demonstrations. Scientists use big data to sway elections and predict riots — welcome to the 1960s Jill Lepore A cold-war-era corporation fast and break things’ was Facebook’s motto. and during Donald Trump’s US presidential Never look back. Another word for this is heed- election campaign in 2016. targeted voters and presaged lessness. And here are a few more: negligence, Journalists accused Trump’s fixers of using a many of today’s big-data foolishness and blindness. “weaponized AI propaganda machine” capable controversies. Much of what technology leaders tout as of “nearly impenetrable voter manipulation”. original has been done before — and long ago. New? Hardly. Simulmatics invented that in Yet few engineers and developers realize that 1959. They called it the People Machine. gnorance of history is a badge of honour in they’re stuck in a rut. That lack of awareness As an American historian with an interest Silicon Valley. “The only thing that matters has costs, both economic and ethical. in politics, law and technology, I came across is the future,” self-driving-car engineer Consider the strange trajectory of the the story of the Simulmatics Corporation five Anthony Levandowski told The New Yorker Simulmatics Corporation, founded in New years ago when researching an article about in 2018 (ref. 1). York City in 1959. (Simulmatics, a mash-up of the polling industry3. Polling was, and remains, ILevandowski, formerly of Google, Uber ‘simulation’ and ‘automatic’, meant then what in disarray. Now, it’s being supplanted by data and Google’s autonomous-vehicle subsidiary ‘artificial intelligence (AI)’ means now.) Its science: why bother telephoning someone Waymo (and recently sentenced to 18 months controversial work included simulating elec- to ask her opinion when you can find out by in prison for stealing trade secrets), is no out- tions — just like that allegedly ‘pioneered’ by tracking her online? lier. The gospel of ‘disruptive innovation’ the now-defunct UK firm Cambridge Analytica Wondering where this began took me to the depends on the abnegation of history2. ‘Move on behalf of UK Brexit campaigners in 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) 348 | Nature | Vol 585 | 17 September 2020 ©2020 Spri nger Nature Li mited. All rights reserved. ©2020 Spri nger Nature Li mited. All rights reserved. in Cambridge, to the unpublished papers of for Communist Communications), funded automation. In St Louis, Missouri, in September political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool. He helped by the US Department of Defense’s Advanced 1960 he’d delivered a speech warning about the to establish the Simulmatics Corporation Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Its aim, “replacement of men by machines”. A Kennedy and led the cold-war-era campaign to bring in modern terms, was to try to detect Rus- campaign brochure asked: “If Automation takes behavioural science into the defence industry, sian hacking — “to know how leaks, rumors, over your job … who will you want in the White campaigning and commerce. This story struck and intentional disclosures spread” as Pool House?” Newspaper editors and commenta- me as so essential to modern ethical dilemmas described it. tors charged him with hypocrisy. around data science, from misinformation The press called Simulmatics scientists The ensuing debate raised questions that and election interference to media manipu- the “What-If Men”, because their work — pro- are still asked today — urgently. Can computers lation and predictive policing, that I wrote a gramming an IBM 704 — was based on endless rig elections? What does election prediction book about it: If Then: How the Simulmatics what-if simulations. The IBM 704 was billed as mean for democracy? What does automation Corporation Invented the Future (2020). the first mass-produced computer capable of mean for humanity? What happens to privacy Simulmatics, hired first by the US doing complex mathematics. Today, this kind in an age of data? There were no answers then, Democratic Party’s National Committee in of work is much vaunted and lavishly funded. as now. Lasswell merely admitted: “You can’t 1959 and then by the John F. Kennedy campaign The 2018 Encyclopedia of Database Systems simulate the consequences of simulation.” in 1960, pioneered the use of computer sim- describes ‘what-if analysis’ as “a data-intensive The most prescient critique came from ulation, pattern detection and prediction in simulation”. It refers to it as “a relatively recent another of Lasswell’s former collaborators, American political campaigning. The company discipline”. Not so. Eugene Burdick. His dystopian novel The 480, gathered opinion-poll data from the archives published in 1964, described a barely fic- of pollsters George Gallup and Elmo Roper to Winning ways tionalized organization called Simulations create a model of the US electorate. John F. Kennedy won the 1960 US presidential Enterprises. In a sober preface, Burdick, a polit- They split voters into 480 types — Demo- election by the closest popular-vote margin ical scientist at the University of California, cratic female blue-collar Midwesterner who since the 1880s — 49.7% to Richard Nixon’s Berkeley, and bestselling novelist — known voted for Democratic presidential candidate 49.5%. Before Kennedy’s inauguration, a storm for co-authoring The Ugly American in 1958 — Adlai Stevenson in 1952 but for the Republican erupted when Harper’s magazine featured a warned against the political influence of what Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, say. And they shocking story: a top-secret computer called is now called data science. assigned issues of concern, such as the impor- the People Machine, invented by mysterious “The new underworld is made up of innocent tance of civil rights or a strong stand against What-If Men, had in effect elected Kennedy. and well-intentioned people,” he wrote. Most the Soviet Union, into 60 clusters. It was, at the Lasswell called it “the A-bomb of the social of them are “highly educated, many with PhDs”. time, the largest such project ever conducted. sciences”. They “work with slide rules and calculating It involved what Simulmatics called “mas- machines and computers which can retain an sive data” decades before ‘big data’ became “Their very lack of interest in almost infinite number of bits of information a buzzword. as well as sort, categorize, and reproduce this Simulmatics was staffed by eminent contemplating the possible information at the press of a button”. scientists. Led by Pool, the group included consequences of their work Although none of the researchers he had researchers from MIT, Yale University in New stood as a terrible danger.” met “had malignant political designs on the Haven, Connecticut, Johns Hopkins University American public”, Burdick warned, their very in Baltimore, Maryland, and Columbia lack of interest in contemplating the possible University in New York City. It also included Kennedy had been trailing Nixon in the consequences of their work stood as a terrible Alex Bernstein from IBM, who had written the polls all summer. He had gained on Nixon danger. Indeed, they might “radically recon- first chess-playing computer program. Many in the autumn for three reasons: Kennedy struct the American political system, build a of them, including Pool, had been trained by championed civil rights and increased his new politics, and even modify revered and ven- Yale political scientist Harold Lasswell, whose share of African American votes; as a Catholic, erable American institutions — facts of which research on communication purported to he took a strong stance on freedom of religion; they are blissfully innocent”. explain how ideas get into people’s heads: and he outperformed Nixon in four televised Burdick knew these researchers, and he had in short, who says what, in which channel, to debates. Simulmatics had recommended each worked with Pool as well as Lasswell. He spied whom, with what effect? During the Second of these strategies. in their ambition, in their enthralment with World War, Lasswell studied the Nazis’ use Uproar broke out. The New York Herald the capacities of computers, the wide-eyed of propaganda and psychological warfare. Tribune called the People Machine Kennedy’s heedlessness that remains Silicon Valley’s When those terms became unpalatable after “secret weapon”. The Chicago Sun-Times Achilles heel. the war ended, the field got a new name — wondered whether politicians of the future mass-communications research. Same wine, would have to “Clear it with the P.-M.”. An Big business new bottle. Oregon newspaper expressed the view that Buoyed by the buzz of Kennedy’s election, Like Silicon Valley itself, Simulmatics was Simulmatics had reduced voters to “little holes Simulmatics began an advertising blitz. Its 1961 an artefact of the cold war. It was an age in punch cards”, and that, by denying the possi- initial stock offering set out how the company obsessed with prediction, as historian Jenny bility of dissent, the People Machine made “the would turn prediction into profit — by gather- Andersson showed in her brilliant 2018 book, tyrannies of Hitler, Stalin and their forebears ing massive data, constructing mathematical The Future of the World. At MIT, Pool also pro- look like the inept fumbling of a village bully”. models of behavioural processes, and using posed and headed Project ComCom (short Worse, Kennedy had campaigned against them to simulate “probable group behaviour”. Nature | Vol 585 | 17 September 2020 | 349 ©2020 Spri nger Nature Li mited. All rights reserved. ©2020 Spri nger Nature Li mited. All rights reserved. Comment The firm pitched its services to media But the fantasy of computer-aided riot Century”5. Although leaders in times past had companies, government departments and prediction endured, as widely and passion- consulted philosophy, literature and history, advertising agencies, with mixed success.