In the new Technology Review article “The Limits of Social Engineering,” Nicholas Carr looks at the potential and pitfalls of Big Data, which can tell us where things are going but can also bury the lead. In the piece, Carr references a 1969 Playboy interview with Marshall McLuhan, which was both really wrong and really right. The opening:

“In 1969, Playboy published a long, freewheeling interview with Marshall McLuhan in which the media theorist and sixties icon sketched a portrait of the future that was at once seductive and repellent. Noting the ability of digital computers to analyze data and communicate messages, he predicted that the machines eventually would be deployed to fine-tune society’s workings. ‘The computer can be used to direct a network of global thermostats to pattern life in ways that will optimize human awareness,’ he said. ‘Already, it’s technologically feasible to employ the computer to program societies in beneficial ways.’ He acknowledged that such centralized control raised the specter of ‘brainwashing, or far worse,’ but he stressed that ‘the programming of societies could actually be conducted quite constructively and humanistically.’

The interview appeared when computers were used mainly for arcane scientific and industrial number-crunching. To most readers at the time, McLuhan’s words must have sounded far-fetched, if not nutty. Now they seem prophetic. With smartphones ubiquitous, Facebook inescapable, and wearable computers like Google Glass emerging, society is gaining a digital sensing system. People’s location and behavior are being tracked as they go through their days, and the resulting information is being transmitted instantaneously to vast server farms. Once we write the algorithms needed to parse all that ‘big data,’ many sociologists and statisticians believe, we’ll be rewarded with a much deeper understanding of what makes society tick.

One of big data’s keenest advocates is Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, a data scientist who, as the director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, has long used computers to study the behavior of businesses and other organizations. In his brief but ambitious new book, Social Physics, Pentland argues that our greatly expanded ability to gather behavioral data will allow scientists to develop ‘a causal theory of social structure’ and ultimately establish ‘a mathematical explanation for why society reacts as it does’ in all manner of circumstances. As the book’s title makes clear, Pentland thinks that the social world, no less than the material world, operates according to rules. There are ‘statistical regularities within human movement and communication,’ he writes, and once we fully understand those regularities, we’ll discover ‘the basic mechanisms of social interactions.'”