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from the Wait-long-enough-and-sc-fi-always-becomes-sci-fact dept.
In 1951 Isaac Asimov inflicted psychohistory on the world with the Foundation Trilogy. Now, thanks to data sets going back more than 2,500 years, scientists have discovered the rules underlying the rise and fall of civilizations, after examining more than 400 such historical societies crash and burn - or in some cases avoid crashing. More here:
Turchin's approach to history, which uses software to find patterns in massive amounts of historical data, has only become possible recently, thanks to the growth in cheap computing power and the development of large historical datasets. This "big data" approach is now becoming increasingly popular in historical disciplines. Tim Kohler, an archaeologist at Washington State University, believes we are living through "the glory days" of his field, because scholars can pool their research findings with unprecedented ease and extract real knowledge from them. In the future, Turchin believes, historical theories will be tested against large databases, and the ones that do not fit – many of them long-cherished – will be discarded. Our understanding of the past will converge on something approaching an objective truth.
Discuss. Or throw rocks.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday November 18 2019, @10:36PM (2 children)
Billy Gates is the Mule....so, Hari Seldon(sp?) is Richard Stallman?
Trump is Mule, ......?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19 2019, @01:56AM (1 child)
No, Bill Gates is the Emperor, Steve Jobs was the Mule. Richard Stallman is Hari Seldon. Silicon Valley is Trantor. USA is the Empire. FSF is the First Foundation.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Wednesday November 20 2019, @07:16PM
RMS is an object lesson in the perils of dogmatism in a dog-eat-dog world. Information might "want" to be free, but the essentials of life aren't.
As for predictions, I stopped developing software for a living at the beginning of the decade when my vision went. I can read again, and everything I was saying a decade ago came true. C++ became a bloated mess. Ruby and Rails were dads. Perl's bastard offspring Parrot is pining for the fjords. Java finally got the switch statement and the ternary operator, but what an over complicated mess. Linux has paid the price for fragmentation - and systemd was a Trojan Horse that gives nothing to the average desktop user or developer. There's no innovation, just more recycling the same old same old, unless you look at China (I admit I didn't see that one coming - China getting more patents every year than the US, Europe, Japan, Taiwan combined).
I wanted to return to writing software, but there is nothing out there that isn't pretty much morally and ethically compromised. The only winning move is not to play the game. We probably passed "peak making interesting shit" in 2005. Maybe earlier. So, like psychohistory, either the industry recreates itself so that it stops concentrating more and more power into free and fewer players, or it dies.
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