Today's muse, I was watching Wimbledon tennis on TV the other day, and they have a neat feature showing a player's court coverage. Every time a player hits a ball, they freeze a picture of the player at the time of the ball strike, and continue the video until the next ball strike, freezing a picture at every ball strike of a point. When the point is over, they have a series of still images illustrating the player's court coverage. For those that follow the sport, Venus Williams' court coverage, when illustrated with the this technique, is amazing, but I digress.
What if we were to use this technique to trace our movements as a society of people. I keep coming back to the image of an ant colony, all purposefully moving about with clear collective goals in mind, at least as observed by us, but convinced, at least so I image, that they are acting from "free will". There are of course lot's of motion studies, automotive traffic engineers have built up an entire science on traffic flows, and I am sure retailers have reams of data on pedestrian flows in malls and of course the demography of migrations. But I am thinking about human flows on a far larger scale, both in numbers or people tracked, the time frames and the data points. Perhaps using a freeze frame concept of tracking as a data point, for example, every time someone talks in person to a "different" individual.
What would we learn? We would certainly see the rhythms of the day, but I suspect that given time and scale, we would see more subtle attributes. For example, would we see any correlation between inventiveness and communication? Correlations with income, education...? Leaving the issues of privacy/big brother aside, this is computationally at least, akin to weather forecasting, would we then have human forecasting, if so what would a human forecast look like? And of course there is the age old question, would watching ourselves to this level of detail and scale, change our collective behavior?
What if we were to use this technique to trace our movements as a society of people. I keep coming back to the image of an ant colony, all purposefully moving about with clear collective goals in mind, at least as observed by us, but convinced, at least so I image, that they are acting from "free will". There are of course lot's of motion studies, automotive traffic engineers have built up an entire science on traffic flows, and I am sure retailers have reams of data on pedestrian flows in malls and of course the demography of migrations. But I am thinking about human flows on a far larger scale, both in numbers or people tracked, the time frames and the data points. Perhaps using a freeze frame concept of tracking as a data point, for example, every time someone talks in person to a "different" individual.
What would we learn? We would certainly see the rhythms of the day, but I suspect that given time and scale, we would see more subtle attributes. For example, would we see any correlation between inventiveness and communication? Correlations with income, education...? Leaving the issues of privacy/big brother aside, this is computationally at least, akin to weather forecasting, would we then have human forecasting, if so what would a human forecast look like? And of course there is the age old question, would watching ourselves to this level of detail and scale, change our collective behavior?
Leave a comment