The People Machine: The Earliest Machine Learning?

In September 2020, the Harvard Data Science Initiative (HDSI) invited Jill Lepore and Fran Berman to a special event to talk about data science and the Simulmatics Corporation, the focus of Jill’s new book If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future. Jill’s book tells the compelling story of one of the first corporations to use the power of digital data to both understand and illuminate the world around us, as well as to manipulate the population and skew behavioral outcomes, a kind of power hyped as “the People Machine” by Simulmatics’ PR team. The conversants, data scientist Fran Berman and writer and historian Jill Lepore, had met as Radcliffe Fellows in 2019 and are both passionate about the societal impacts of technology. They were delighted to carry on their conversation, started at Radcliffe, about data, society, information, truth and trust at the HDSI event. This piece is an edited and streamlined version of their HDSI discussion, whose live video recording can be found below.