IDEA OF THE WEEK

Think about how many people you really know. Family, friends, colleagues, the neighbor who waves over the wall. A few dozen, maybe a few hundred. That is about what the human brain was built for.

Now think about the world: more than eight billion people. Decisions made by governments and companies affect all of them, yet none of us can picture more than a tiny slice.

Oxford anthropologist Tamás Dávid-Barrett has an idea to help. His company, FHSR, is building Humanity Explorer, a digital world filled with artificial people.

Meet the synthetic population

These are not copies of real people. Each synthetic person has their own background, community, beliefs and way of seeing the world. One might be a young woman in a South Korean city who has decided not to have children. Another might be a care worker in a small Swedish town. Another might be a Namibian family with its own ideas about duty and belonging.

In real life, these people would never sit in the same room. In Humanity Explorer, you can ask them all the same question and compare their answers.

“We are not a forecasting company; we are a company that helps and supports human thinking,” says Dávid-Barrett.

Google Earth for people

The easiest way to picture it is as Google Earth for society. Zoom out and you see the whole planet. Zoom in and you land in a country, then a town, then a single person’s life.

Why does that matter? Our picture of other countries is often decades out of date, stuck with whatever we learnt at school. “The whole point is that you can find people who are not you,” he says.

A lab for big decisions

The tool also works as a testing ground. In one experiment, researchers looked at child support in a wealthy country. A small monthly payment changed almost nothing, and only a far bigger amount started to shift behavior. The goal was not to find the “right price” for having children. It was to test an idea safely before anyone spends real money.

“You can use it as a Petri dish,” says Dávid-Barrett.

Does it work? When the team put questions from a major European survey to their synthetic people, the answers came close to what real Europeans had said.

The focus group that could never happen

This is where it gets exciting. Imagine bringing together someone from a desert community in Namibia, someone from a rainforest community in Panama and someone from a village in the Amazon, then asking them all about tourism or climate action. In reality, organizing that would be almost impossible. In Humanity Explorer, their synthetic counterparts can sit around the same virtual table.

A headteacher with a phone

One of Dávid-Barrett’s favorite ideas is surprisingly down to earth. Picture a school principal with no computer lab, just a phone with WhatsApp. He wants that principal to be able to use the system, for example to work out how to make learners’ journeys to school safer. It already works in around 80 languages.

A tool, not a fortune teller

For all its promise, Dávid-Barrett is clear about its limits. The answers are only as good as the model behind them, and the tool is not meant to tell anyone which policy is right. A microscope shows you what is there, but it does not tell you what to think.

Will seeing more of the world help us understand one another better? Even Dávid-Barrett won’t promise that. But in a world this big, a better look at our neighbors is a good place to start.

Catch Dr David-Barrett’s Public Lecture at NUST on 29th September.