A Socio-Technical System for Investigating the Dynamics of Political Instability

Cliodynamics is the new transdisciplinary field that combines analysis of historical data with the tools of complexity science. One major question is, why do human societies experience recurrent waves of social turbulence and political instability that often end in an outbreak of internal warfare? A major effort of the Social Complexity and Collapse project at the Complexity Science Hub, which I lead, is to collect quantitative data on the dynamics of socio-political instability in past societies. We need such data to empirically test a variety of theories that propose explanations for why collective violence within polities waxes and wanes. My talk will report on the current work by our team on combining AI and human expertise to generate instability data for past societies.

Background reading: Turchin, Peter. 2023. End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (Penguin Random House, New York and London). (The respondent, Thomas D. Grant, is the co-author, with Damon J. Wischik, of On the Path to AI: Law's Prophecies and the Conceptual Foundations of the Machine Learning Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; open access).)