From Frank Aquino
West Leederville, Western Australia
Laura Spinney's account of the Seshat history-database project (15 October, p 38) is worth rereading again and again. It gives me hope that humanity (some of it anyway) really is trying to avoid the catastrophic errors of the past. Combine this with techniques for learning from big data, and the proposal in science fiction writer Isaac Asimov's Foundation books of a statistical “psychohistory” may become a genuine field of study that allows us to steer humanity away from the worst of the future's pitfalls.
