From Psychohistory to Babelfish – From predicting the future to mind-reading
My research of the last twenty years was inspired by Isaac Asimov’s fictional science of psychohistory . In his Foundation Series science fiction stories, Asimov describes how mathematician Hari Seldon was able to predict the future a thousand years ahead through the discipline of psychohistory that Seldon invented. Its premise was that while it is impossible to predict the behavior of an individual, the aggregated behavior of millions and billions of people extending over the galaxy can be predicted accurately by studying their communication patterns. However already in his stories Asimov posited that it is impossible to predict “ black swan events ”, i.e. unexpected random events. In Asimov’s story, the appearance of the “Mule”, a mutant conqueror who could read and manipulate the mind of others, a few hundred years after Seldon made his predictions, threw Seldon’s predictions totally off. This is where Babelfish comes in, a tool envisioned by Douglas Adams in his science fiction c