If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future

"Well, it’s important as a symbol of where we are now—if it had truly changed our lives we would have heard of if it. What Jill Lepore has done here is unearthed a company that most people had forgotten about. Simulmatics Corporation was actively looking at and developing some of the things that we now associate with big data predictive analysis: Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, all the various scandals and worries to do with harnessing technology to predict human behaviour and indeed to win elections. So it’s a history, but one with great relevance for today. She points out that this long-forgotten technology company really pioneered using data science in politics, notably in JFK ‘s successful presidential campaign in 1960. It essentially laid the foundations for predictive analytics that we now come across—even if we don’t realize it—whenever we use an internet platform or click on an online ad or, indeed, vote for a candidate. I think one of the reasons why it’s a shortlisted book is that it is beautifully written. Jill Lepore is a wonderful writer. The book also has this nice relevance, bringing a historical fact into the new light of today and saying, ‘Look, here are some of the issues that this rather simple, early, pioneering version was raising in the 1960s and that are still relevant.’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Into that, she’s woven the story of a company which actually was a bit shambolic and not very successful, because it didn’t survive. It sort of imploded. She identifies some of the slightly wacky 1950s, 1960s elements of the story. There’s quite a lot about how they set up in Saigon during the Vietnam War , running an expat bubble within a chaotic, collapsing, war-torn society. That colour is what gives it a lot of vibrancy and interest as a book, rather than just as a slightly cautionary tale for today. She’s got a good sardonic, wry tone. It takes the edge off, it’s not preaching to us. It’s telling us about a company culture, and in that sense it’s a bit like the Netflix book. But, in this case, it’s a company that has these extraordinary aspirations and the technology and brain power to bring them off. But, in the end, it didn’t succeed and it disappeared. Just the fact that none of us has heard of this company is interesting, given the scale of its ambition and the things that it tried to do that are now being done. There’s a bit in the book where the chief executive, who is an academic focusing on social networks, foresees the data-mad and near-totalitarian 21st century that he was instrumental in helping to create. In the book, there is a certain amount of, ‘if only we’d gone back and been able to change history, maybe we would have been able to forestall some of the dystopia that we’re now living in.’"

"It’s business history. It’s a history of one of the first companies to use computers in a systematic way to try to make forecasts. They started out doing political forecasting. Then they did some business forecasting. And they got incredibly ambitious, and tried to do things like forecast the outcome of the Vietnam War and how to affect that, and how to win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. I’m very interested in efforts to use computers to understand society, because I think we’re going through that debate again, in talking about AI. Some of the visions that people have had for using AI to understand what’s going on now are just like the visions that were around in the 1960s, except with faster computers, and more data. So it’s a very good object lesson in why you should be cautious about any forecasts about the future. I’m thinking, in particular, about someone like Dominic Cummings , and the room he set up in the Cabinet Office to have screens full of data, taking the temperature of what’s going on in the economy, and the dangers that can lead you into. They did both, but a lot of their work was for the US government, or the Department of Defense. A lot of it was political consulting. We’re still very familiar with that kind of work, manipulating the data to try and work out which are the key states for deciding an election, and what the key issues to influence voters are. So it’s all around still—you might think about Cambridge Analytica as another parallel to the kind of work that they did. Jill Lepore is a brilliant writer. It’s a dream to read. It did. It went bankrupt, partly through over-ambition and not being very well-run, but also partly because more and more companies piled into the same markets. So you got, for example, all the Madison Avenue companies doing marketing forecasting, and a lot of other political consultants coming on the scene using the same techniques. It became a much more competitive market."