"Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." So says Salvor Hardin in Isaac Asimov's celebrated 1951 novel Foundation, which imagines an organisation dedicated to predicting and reshaping the course of human history - in this case, the fate of the Galactic Empire - through the use of a statistical discipline dubbed "psychohistory". For more than half a century, psychohistory has been no more than a fantasy. But the power of "big data" makes it conceivable that some modest version of these predictive powers is achievable. For example, researchers hope that a new database of geopolitical events will eventually help them to project how conflicts will play out (see page 19).
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