Comment AFP VIA GETTY Protests Against Racism in Detroit, Michigan, and Many Other US Cities in 1967 Prompted Attempts to Forecast Future Demonstrations

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)

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”.

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. It ately held as the twenty-first century’s dream those of the cold-war era, he argued, were obli- persuaded executives from the Motion Picture that all urban problems can be solved by ‘smart gated to consult the social sciences. Given a Association of America, MGM film studios and cities’, and that civil unrest, racial inequality choice between “policy based on moralisms Columbia Records to set up forms of analysis and police brutality can be addressed by more and policy based on social science”, he was glad that would ultimately, when it was possible to cameras, more data, bigger computers and yet to report that the United States, in conducting collect enough data to make this work, lead to more what-if algorithms. the war in Vietnam, had rejected the former in Netflix and Spotify. It proposed a “mass cul- favour of rationality. ture model” to collect consumer data across Predictive demise To me, this sounds a lot like Levandowski. all media — publishing houses, record labels, Simulmatics began to unravel in 1969. Student “I don’t even know why we study history,” magazine publishers, television networks, and protesters at MIT accused the company of war Levandowski said in 2018 (ref. 1). “It’s entertain- film studios — to direct advertising and sales. crimes for its work in Vietnam. They even held ing, I guess — the dinosaurs and the Neander- It sounds a lot like Amazon. a mock trial of Pool, calling him a war criminal. thals and the Industrial Revolution and stuff Simulmatics introduced what-if simulation “Simulmatics looks like nothing more than a like that. But what already happened doesn’t to the advertising industry, targeting con- dummy corporation through which Pool runs really matter.” Except, it does matter. Attempt- sumers with custom-fit messages. In 1962, his outside Defense work,” the New Republic ing to thwart revolt and defeat social unrest by it became the first data firm to provide real- reported. “Simulation companies are not so way of predictive algorithms has been tried time computing to a US newspaper, The New popular as they once were; their proprietors before; it failed, and was ethically indefensible. York Times, for analysing election results. For are often regarded as cultists, and the generals This summer, under pressure from the Black the government, it proposed models to aid who were persuaded to hire them by liberals Lives Matter movement, US police depart- public-health campaigns, water-distribution in the Kennedy and early Johnson administra- ments are abandoning predictive policing, an systems, and, above all, the winning of hearts tions are sour on the whole business.” industry led by the data-analytics firm PredPol and minds in Vietnam. There were problems with early predictive in Santa Cruz, California. IBM and Google have, In 1963, on behalf of the Kennedy analytics, too. Data were scarce, computers at least publicly, pulled back from another administration, Simulmatics simulated the were slow. Simulmatics filed for bankruptcy form of algorithm-driven surveillance, facial entire economy of Venezuela, with an eye to in 1970, and vanished. recognition. Maybe these detours might have halting the advance of socialism and com- Pool went on to become a prophet of been avoided if the people developing them munism. A larger project to undertake such technological change. “By 2018 it will be had stopped to consider their origins in the work throughout Latin America, mostly cheaper to store information in a computer Vietnam War. designed by Pool and known as Project bank than on paper,” he wrote in 1968, in a con- It’s worth remembering, too, that protesters Camelot, became so controversial that the next tribution to a book called Toward the Year 2018 at the time understood that connection. In president, Lyndon B. Johnson, dismantled it. (ref. 4). Tax returns, social security and crimi- 1969, MIT activists objecting to companies After 1965, Simulmatics conducted nal records would all be stored on computers, such as Simulmatics asked what, really, was the psychological research in Vietnam as part of which could communicate with one another point of making human behaviour a predictive a bigger project to use computers to predict over a vast international network. science, in a world of agonizing inequalities revolutions. Much of this work built on ear- People living in 2018 would be able to find of power. What was it all for? How was it likely lier research by Lasswell and Pool, identifying out anything about anyone, he wrote, with- to be used? and counting keywords, such as ‘nationalism’, out ever leaving their desks. “The researcher As one student protester asked in an anti- in foreign-language newspapers that might sitting at his console will be able to compile a war pamphlet: “To do what? To do things like indicate the likelihood of coups. Such topic- cross-tabulation of consumer purchases (from estimate the number of riot police necessary spotting is the precursor to Google Trends. store records) by people of low IQ (from school to stop a ghetto rebellion in city X that might records) who have an unemployed member be triggered by event Y because of communi- Growing unrest of the family (from social security records).” cations pattern K given Q number of political Simulmatics brought those counter-insurgency Would he have the legal right to do so? agitators of type Z?” methods home in 1967 and 1968, as protests Pool had no answer: “This is not the place to It’s a question worth asking today, all against racial injustice broke out on the streets speculate how society will achieve a balance over again. of US cities such as Los Angeles, California, and between its desire for knowledge and its desire Detroit, Michigan. The company attempted for privacy.” to build a race-riot prediction machine for The author the Johnson administration. It failed. But its Collective amnesia cockeyed ambition — the drive to forecast Before his early death in 1984, Pool was also Jill Lepore is professor of American history political unrest — was widely shared, and has a key force behind the founding of the most at Harvard University in Cambridge, endured, not least in the ethically indefensible direct descendant of Simulmatics, the MIT Massachusetts, a staff writer at The New work of predictive policing. Media Lab. Pool’s work underlies the rules — Yorker, host of podcast The Last Archive, Civil-rights activists, then as now, had little or lack of them — that prevail on the Internet. and author of If Then: How the Simulmatics use for such schemes. “I will not predict riots,” Pool also founded the study of “social net- Corporation Invented the Future (2020). James Farmer, head of the Congress of Racial works” (a term he coined); without it, there 1. Duhigg, C. ‘Did Uber Steal Google’s Intellectual Property?’ Equality, said on CBS TV’s Face the Nation in would be no Facebook. Pool’s experiences with The New Yorker (22 October 2018). April 1965. “No one has enough knowledge to student unrest at MIT — and especially with 2. Lepore, J. ‘The Disruption Machine’ The New Yorker know that.” The real issue, he pointed out, was the protests against Simulmatics — informed (23 June 2014). that no one was addressing the problems that his views on technological change and ethics. 3. Lepore, J. ‘Politics and the New Machine’ The New Yorker (16 November 2015). led to unrest. “I am not going to predict rioting Look forward. Never look back. 4. Mesthene, E. G. (ed.) Toward the Year 2018 (Foreign Policy here,” Martin Luther King Jr told the press in In 1966, Pool described the social sciences Association, 1968). Cleveland, Ohio, in June 1967. as “the new humanities of the Twentieth 5. de Sola Pool, I. Backgr. 10, 111–122 (1966).