Alex Pentland, in a book published by Universita' Bocconi Editore, systematises a new science that aims to improve the functioning of small groups, companies and entire cities. Isaac Asimov, in the Foundation cycle, imagines that a new science, psychohistoriography, is able to predict the behavior of large masses of people by combining history, sociology and statistics. Alex Pentland, director of the MIT Media Lab, believes that the pervasiveness of electronic devices – together with the possibility of creating new ones in order to observe the behavior of consenting individuals – creates such a mass of digital traces as to provide scientists with a sufficient amount of data to study, predict and possibly modify the people's behavior on an infinitely smaller scale: from a city to a company, to a group of friends or cohabitants.
From this new science, systematized by Pentland, it also takes its title his latest book, published in Italy by Bocconi University, “Social Physics. How good ideas spread, (UBE 2015, 288 pages, 22 euros, 11,99 e-pub), foreword by Filippo Barbera, afterword by Cosimo Accoto).
Just as physics derives the laws of motion starting from energy flows, Pentland's social physics derives the laws of human behavior starting from the flows of ideas and information and believes it can "build better social structures". With millions and millions of data points at his disposal, Pentland observed that the most efficient social networks are characterized by a rich flow of ideas and well-functioning mechanisms of social learning and that – unlike what is postulated by the economy, the incentives that work best are not the individual ones, but the social ones: I reward you not when you behave in a certain way, but when the members of your network do it.
Through the MIT Media Lab and numerous spin-offs created with his students, Pentland has also applied his theory to very different fields and scales, with experiences that have translated into publications in the most accredited scientific journals. Thanks to the small interventions suggested by social physics, he managed to improve the returns of active investors on an online trading platform, to increase the productivity of call centres, to make members of a small community lose kilos, to locate, in less than 9 hours, ten red balloons of two and a half meters in diameter randomly scattered throughout the United States by Darpa (Defence advanced research project agency). By observing the movements of individuals he manages to predict their probability of falling ill, but also to design an urban transport network that helps to increase the creative output and the GDP of a city.
Pentland does not escape the dangers inherent in such an intensive use of big data and, in the book, he proposes a regulation capable of balancing people's privacy needs and the benefits obtainable thanks to the availability of data to be analysed.
WHO IS THE AUTHOR – Alex Pentland directs the Human Dynamics Laboratory and the Media Lab Entreoreneurship Program at MIT. He was co-founder and director of the MIT Media Lab, Media Lab Asia and the Indian Institute of Technology. He is the World Economics Forum's advisor on big data projects. In 2012 he was defined by Forbes among the seven most influential data scientists in the world. His research has been published in Nature, Science and Harvard Business Review.
