Book Review: Prediction of human behavior in the age of large data

Book Reviewer Hu Yu

The famous science fiction "Three Bodies" tells the story: there are many civilizations in the universe that humans have not yet understood until one Earth man communicates with three of people. Since then, the three-body civilization began to understand the Earth's civilization, and tried to use the "psychological collapse" of the way to control scientists, to prevent the Earth's civilization and progress of ambition-if the three-body civilization produced Barabasi, complex http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/ 8976.html "The authority of the network research, perhaps without any difficulty, can know how to understand the human behavior of the earth."

In Barabasi (albert-l szl barab si) 's new book, "Eruption: The big data age to foresee the future" in the novel thinking, he tried to answer the question: can human behavior be predicted? The Fellow of the American Academy of Physics skillfully combined history and mathematics to answer the question in an interesting way:

"In human long history, human behavior is not random, not Poisson distribution, but there are certain rules." Through the analysis of large data, we can see that human behavior rules are based on priority arrangement problem. Each person has his or her own task list, and how the order of precedence has different effects. ”

In other words, when you have an urgent matter and need to contact someone, how do you think you can reach your goal by contacting each other best? Telephone, SMS, microblog or micro-mail? In Barabasi's eyes, the best way to predict each other's behavior is to judge the priorities of each task and pick the highest one. Because humans unconsciously list a priority and prioritize the tasks that need to be completed over time.

This seems to be simple, but not the author of the story, in the "Outbreak" of a book, Barabasi like a historical novel, the story of a section of history, layer by layer, people immersed in one breath, "burst" to read the book.

The book is logically rigorous, and at the beginning of each article begins with a historical story, vividly describes the cause and the cause of the phenomenon of human behavior "eruption", and points out that human behavior is not according to Poisson distribution, but power law------------------------

After reading this book, my first reaction is three-body story, the second reaction is computer scientist Jaron (Jaron Lanier) for the post-Web2.0 era depicts a scene: The Internet giant master data and "cloud", the wisdom of the group to absorb, and affect the group. With the advent of the big data age, more and more data are being held in the internet giants. If you can really analyze and dig through large data, every user's behavior is likely to be mastered.

Alan, the father of artificial intelligence, has put forward a principle to judge robots:

One was tested, the other was a machine claiming to have human intelligence. The tester is separate from the person being tested, testers can only pass some devices to the tested person to ask questions, if the tester is able to correctly distinguish who is the person who is the machine, the machine is not through Turing Test, if the tester does not distinguish who is the machine who is human, then the machine has human intelligence.

This is the famous Turing test.

Assuming that Barabasi's theory can be combined with large data, can the AI machine pass the Turing test by acquiring the behavior distribution data of the test person, under the fast operation?

I think it is possible, although the understanding of the machine in semantics is still in a research phase, but the user "burst" behavior analysis can provide an accurate way to imitate human--in this regard, the domestic Internet giants have been actively started to act.

Although it may sound like fear, in my opinion, we should be optimistic. Because humans only consciously share a part of the message. In the follow-up development, people actively share their data also has its advantages-such as heart disease, obesity and other diseases can be effectively prepared.

In any case, Barabasi shows us a new worldview. In the era of large data, we can better use the data to guide their own development, actively use the "burst" power law to help themselves better life.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)