We have discussed the sf idea of a predictive social science, mainly Asimov's psychohistory and Anderson's psychotechnics. Can sufficiently powerful computers predict future events? What better fictional sources that Poul Anderson's Technic History and Time Patrol series?
"'If we possessed Syrax,' said Aycharaych, 'it would, with 71 per cent probability, hasten the collapse of the Terran hegemony by a hundred years, plus or minus ten. That is the verdict of our military computers - though I myself feel the faith our High Command has in them is naive and rather touching. However, the predicted date of Terra's fall would still lie 150 years hence. So I wonder why your government cares.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Hunters Of The Sky Cave" IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 149-301 AT II, p. 163)
I would call 150 years a very short time, especially with antisenescence and people's natural concerns about their own children and grandchildren.
"'And I have my connections,' Everard said.
"The histories, the data files, the great coordinating computers, the experts of the Time Patrol. The knowledge that this is the proper configuration of a plenum that has powerful negative feedback."
-Poul Anderson, "Star Of The Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 467-640 AT 16, p. 607.
Can Time Patrol computers make detailed analyses of hypothetical divergent timelines?
Next we turn to SM Stirling and David Drake:
"highest probability. 83%, plusminus 4. observe.
"-East Residence was burning. A line of troops retreated down the street outside..."
-The Forge, CHAPTER SIXTEEN, p. 296.
The strategic computer mentally linked to Raj Whitehall not only calculates probabilities but also projects holographic simulations of probable future events into his visual field. Compare Probabilities Observed.
Asimov comments on computer predictions in "The Machine That Won The War." See here.
(Incidentally, Asimov's robots are conscious because they have artificial, "positronic," brains yet Asimov once said that robots were merely mobile computers, thus confusing brains, which generate consciousness, with computers, which merely manipulate inputted symbols.)
4 comments:
Paul:
Piper's The Cosmic Computer is about the hunt for a military-planning computer code-named Merlin, with predictive capabilities ... which most of the searchers wildly overestimate.
"'Its memory-bank contained all human knowledge. It was capable of scanning all its data instantaneously, and combining, and forming associations, and reasoning with absolute accuracy, and extrapolating to produce new facts, and predicting future events, and...'
"And if you'd asked such a computer, 'Is there a God?' it would have simply answered, 'Present.'"
When found, the reality is rather more restrained. A man who'd actually worked with Merlin during the System States War explains, "You know, Merlin can't predict what you or I would do under given circumstances, but Merlin can handle large-group behavior with absolute accuracy." And Merlin's last prediction, immediately after the System States surrendered forty years ago, was of the coming of the Long Night....
Incidentally, the computers in Piper's story also used "positronic brains"; apparently this was his little wave to Asimov.
David,
If they have brains, then they are conscious.
Paul.
Paul:
Merlin is decidedly not conscious. One character who works a lot with robots tends to talk and act as if they were conscious, though. "That's a dirty trick to play on a little robot!" she tells the protagonist when he's wiring one as a mobile bomb. She adds, "They aren't alive—at least, I don't think they are—but they do what you tell them, and they learn tricks, and they have personalities."
Legacy by James H. Schmitz, first published in 1962 (The Cosmic Computer came out in '63), has a scene in which the main character is told that some "collating computers" have predicted an attempt to murder her, by an exceptionally deadly nonhuman. "In the time period I mentioned, a catassin is supposed to show up at your cabin. They give it a pretty high probability."
The fellow who tells her this had grumbled earlier about how irksome he finds it that the computers are usually right. He's delighted when it turns out the machines were mistaken this time. It wasn't a catassin; it was something shockingly even more dangerous than "those swift, clever, constitutionally murderous creatures." His group's precautions stopped it, but ... it almost got through.
Kaor, Paul!
I think we need to remember about Drake/Stirling's "Center" is that it never claimed absolute certainty or to make flat out predictions. Center gave Raj PROBABILITIES and the most accurate possible likelihood of a scenario Raj was shown actually coming to pass, usually with a plus/minus error margin. Center seldom stated that even highly likely probabilities were inevitably going to become realities.
And what you quoted from Chapter I of HUNTERS OF THE SKY CAVE shows Aycharaych as being frankly skeptical of the probabilities offered by the Merseian computers.
With the antisenescence of Technic medical science allowing humans to live more than 100 years in good health and vigor (say as much as 110 years), I agree that the 150 years conceded by Aycharaych as being likely to pass before the Empire fell was not that long! And the mere fact Terra was NOT tamely letting Merseia seize the Syrax cluster unchallenged shows there were STILL men in the Imperium willing to think and act further ahead, who cared about the fates of their children and grandchildren. And the children of other humans and non humans within the Empire.
Sean
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