Assimov, Strugatskii Brothers, and History

A remarkable idea of the Foundation trilogy of Isaac Assimov’s was that of psychohistory; a branch of mathematics that could predict the future, but only on a large scale; it was error-prone for anything smaller than a planet or an empire. It worked on the principle that the behavior of a mass of people could be predictable.

A similar idea was alluded to in the novel “Hard to be a God” by Arkadi and Boris Strugatskii in which Earth’s Institute for Experimental History had been intervening in the history of other planets – which, by implication, meant the existence of a science of theoretical history.

Both of these ideas are now in the process of being realized.

Consider:

A quantitative theory of physical and cultural co-evolution was first pioneered in “Genes, Mind, And Culture: The Coevolutionary Process” by Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson but they did not really delve into the process of history or the behavior of individuals. [A remarkable work nevertheless that was ignored for the most part.]

The task of modeling human history was performed in the book “Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall” by
Peter Turchin. However, Turchin’s book does not model the individuals [as autonomous agents] either. What he does do is the application of differential equations to obtain gross features of the rise and fall of pre-industrial societies. He pays homage to ibn Khaldun's insights in Al Muqaddamah by incorporating his ideas into these models and arrives at quantitative agreements that would make ibn Khaldun proud!

A quantitative framework for the modeling of the individual agents was proposed by Michail Zak in 2 papers: “Dynamics of Intelligent Systems” and “Self-supervised Dynamical Systems”. The essential idea of Zak is the incorporation of the idea of “Self-Image” into stochastic non-linear set of differential equations that describe the behavior of a single individual (of an specific species).

One would think that a synthetic model that combined the gross approaches of Lumsden, Wilson, and Turchin, on the one side and the individual agent approach of Zak on the other would be an even more robust and powerful model to account for some features of human history.

A possible bridge between the two approaches may be found in the work of David Wolpert and his team at NASA’s Ames Research Center ( http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/is/AR/tasks/ColInt.html ). His approach is based on giving goals to individual agents that would naturally optimize the collective. Wolpert is not interested in history, he is interested in engineering design optimization but his approach provides the glue between the two approaches discussed above.

So, in my opinion, all the ingredients for the construction of theoretical history/psychohistory are there, including very cheap hardware computing resources and computer languages and database technologies. I can imagine constructing a model with 1 million coupled Zak-like agents, subject to Wolpert optimization, which are subject to overall dynamics of Turchin, Lumdsen, and Wilson.