Japan · The Guardian Technology
After John F Kennedy won the nomination, his campaign hired Simulmatics to run predictions on an IBM 704
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When Kennedy won, many in the press attributed the victory to Simulmatics’ People Machine.
Key facts
- One was published in 1964: The 480, a political thriller in which a barely disguised “Simulations Enterprises” meddles with a US presidential election
- After John F Kennedy won the nomination, his campaign hired Simulmatics to run predictions on an IBM 704
- There is nothing mysterious about this on the surface, the input to the machine being the information about real individuals obtained in surveys”, Greenfield and the MIT political scientist Ithiel
- The next year, Greenfield and Pool and IBM’s Alex Bernstein formed a company called the Simulmatics Corporation
Summary
One of the stranger things about this dizzying, headlong moment in time is that it doesn’t have much of a past. But of course this weird moment in history does have a past. Things could have turned out differently. And if you look back, one thing you’ll see is that a lot of people saw this all coming. They foresaw their present when it was still the future. B etween the 1950s and the 1980s, computers got smaller, faster, cheaper and more powerful; computer languages became more sophisticated; and electronic data, once a molehill, became a mountain. The adoption and diffusion of such technologies led to wild-eyed speculation about their possible social and political consequences, a discussion that, characteristically, ricocheted between dreams of a technological utopia and fears of an artificial state.