Skinner bitterly lamented the absence of “instruments and methods” for the study of human behavior comparable to those available to physicists. As if in response, Pentland and his students have spent the last two decades determined to invent the instruments and methods that can transform all of human behavior, especially social behavior, into highly predictive math. An early milestone was a 2002 collaboration with then-doctoral student Tanzeem Choudhury, in which the coauthors wrote, “As far as we know, there are currently no available methods to automatically model face-to-face interactions. This absence is probably due to the difficulty of obtaining reliable measurements from real-world interactions within a community.… We believe sensing and modeling physical interactions among people is an untapped resource.” In other words, the “social” remained an elusive domain even as data and computers had become more commonplace.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 1338