How a tiny company paved the way for Big Tech – and big problems
Sixty years ago, a little-known company called the Simulmatics Corporation claimed credit for helping elect John F. Kennedy president by inventing a computer program that could predict human behavior.
Simulmatics – a portmanteau of “simulation” and “automatic” – used bulky IBM computers to vacuum up punch cards full of data on slivers of the electorate and then spit out predictions about what voters might do. The Kennedy campaign followed Simulmatics’s recommendation to
