- Social Physics is a phrase
that's almost 200 years old,
and originally it was supposed
to be using statistics
to understand the evolution of culture.
Social Physics is like Economics,
but it talks about how
ideas spread between people
and how we're not just
rational individuals,
we're also social animals
and part of a social fabric.
And it tries to understand
that the way Economics tries
to understand the actions of individuals
and it's why we have a
census in every country,
to be able to understand ourselves
better through statistics.
But statistics was hard
back in the early 1800s
and they had to do everything by surveys
and that's very expensive.
Today though, there's lots
of data that's both scary
but it's very good for managing society
and our statistical
methods are much better
than they used to be so
the word Social Physics
comes back to mind.
On an individual level, the
main thing is people stealing
your identity or making
decisions about you
like credit rating and
so forth, based on things
that you're not aware
of or erroneous data.
But there are larger
dangers too, so for instance
you could imagine people
making poor decisions
about zoning in cities or health systems
and that's why this sort
of big data and analytics
that come of it ought to
be mostly public so that
we can have a human debate about whether
this makes sense or not.
We need to have the human
involved in this all the time
to make sure that the
right things are happening.
So the reason people like cellphones,
the reason it's spread to
every adult in the world,
is that it helps us do the human things;
to connect with other
people, to get there on time,
to figure out where to go,
the things that we care about doing.
It's not a robot overlord,
it's a tool to help extend
our brains and augment our intelligence.
Cellphones are the best
source of big data because
they're with us all the time
and they show what we do,
not our social face.
They know where you go,
they know who you call,
in the future they'll know what you spend.
So it's a very intimate relationship.
Everybody oughta understand
data, what data can tell you,
what it can't tell you, and be aware
of this new medium in our lives.
The things that I'm working
on now are the things
that excite me, of course,
and that is how can we get
groups of people to work together better,
to make decisions that
are more intelligent.
And I'll give you a sort
of controversial example,
which is we could solve global
warming in about three hours
if we could all somehow
talk together, figure out
what to do and make a
commitment to doing it.
And that's stupid to even
say that because obviously
we can't come to agreement about things.
But that's a problem, that's a technology,
that's — our habits of how
we discuss are wrong.
They're not what they should
be, we need to figure out
how we can talk together better
and make smarter decisions.
And that's what I work on now.
