Pentland recasts society as a causal system to be engineered from behavior data
Evidence
Instead of politics, markets, classes, and so on, Pentland reduces society to his laws of social physics: a reincarnation of Skinner’s “communal science.” Indeed, Pentland regards his work as the practical foundation of a new “computational theory of behavior” capable of producing a “causal theory of social structure… a mathematical explanation of why society reacts as it does and how these reactions may (or may not) solve human problems.…” These new mathematical analyses not only reveal the deep “mechanisms of social interactions” (Skinner’s “special capacities of the group”) but also combine with “our newly acquired massive amounts of behavior data” in order to reveal the patterns of causality that make it possible to “engineer better social systems,” all of it based on “unprecedented instrumentation.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1382
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines ‘social physics’ and ‘computational theory of behavior’ as Pentland’s replacement concepts for politics and markets.
- XREF: Explicitly ties to Skinner (via Zuboff’s own linkage), showing continuity from behaviorism to surveillance-capitalist governance. — connects to: Skinner’s WWII pigeon-guided-missile project transformed his psychology into a technology for society — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1146; B.F. Skinner extrapolated laboratory animal behavior into grand theories of social organization — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1147; Pentland frames ubiquitous behavioral data as a radically new mode of social self-knowledge — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1374 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Pentland frames free will as a low-frequency statistical deviation from predictable social patterns
#expands(0.94) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1406 - Pentland’s sociometer turned social interaction into instrumentable, predictively modelable data
#corroborates(0.92) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1339 - Pentland framed smart infrastructure as a global nervous system for humanity.
#expands(0.88) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1359