301202 History and New Developments of Prediction (BS) (WiSe 2022/2023)

The ubiquity of digital data and the proliferation of ‘intelligent’ analytic techniques have given rise to a pandemic of prediction. Medical doctors try to predict future illnesses. Insurance agents try to predict future claims. Police officers try to predict future crimes. In the midst of this fascination with the latest techniques for knowing the future, it is easy to forget that prediction has a long history as a social and cultural practice. In this seminar, we try to better understand the contemporary fascination for and consequences of prediction by exploring its many pasts. To do so, we engage in an in-depth reading of Martin van Creveld’s book Seeing into the Future: A Short History of Prediction. In his book, van Creveld provides insights to a variety of historical future-making practices, such as speculation, deduction, extrapolation, polling, and modeling. Unpacking differences and similarities of these practices, we also learn about the rise and fall of prominent as well as more obscure occupations such as shamans, prophets, oracles, astrologists, fortune-tellers, ornithoscopists, and haruspices. This seminar is divided in one virtual kick-off session and two in person blocks. There are no mandatory readings for the kickoff session. However, as we work through the book there is a fair amount of mandatory readings in preparation for each of the two in person blocks. There is plenty of time between the sessions to read, but we recommend that you plan ahead your reading. A digital copy of the book will be made available via Lernraum.