Four hundred years ago in what is now the Czech Republic, tossing your enemy out of a window was a dramatic way to make a political statement. On 23 May 1618, in the chancellery of Prague castle, a group of Protestant nobles accused two Catholic royal governors of ignoring their rights. The heated confrontation culminated in the ejection of the Catholic governors and their secretary from a third storey window.
Remarkably, the three men survived the defenestration – thanks to the outstretched arms of angels who swooped in to catch them, if the Catholics were to be believed. According to a Protestant version of events, it was a rather less glamorous pile of manure that broke their fall.
The tussle should have been little more than a footnote in the centuries of simmering, bloody hostility between these two Christian factions in medieval Europe. But it would prove to be far more consequential.
The incident triggered the Protestant-led Bohemian revolt against the Catholic Habsburg emperor, which mutated into one of the most destructive wars in European history – the Thirty Years’ War. The gruelling three decades of conflict would drag in more than a dozen nations and claim millions of lives in the widespread devastation, famine and disease that followed.
It’s one of many examples throughout history of an event having unexpectedly far-reaching consequences.
History is replete with examples: the East German official who misspoke during a press conference and sent thousands rushing to the Berlin Wall, hastening the end of the Cold War; Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s driver taking a wrong turn in Sarajevo, placing him in the path of an assassin and igniting the powder keg that sparked the First World War. The Tunisian fruit seller who set himself on fire after his scales were confiscated by police, triggering the Arab Spring uprisings that engulfed six countries and deposed four state leaders.
Looking back, the warning signs were there to see. A range of factors can provide the tinder for a cataclysmic event. The challenge is knowing, in advance, which spark will catch.
But predicting how and when major world events might unfold is something researchers hope sophisticated artificial intelligence models will one day be able to achieve. They believe that with enough data, it should be possible to map how the ripples caused by seemingly minor incidents build into the tidal waves that can shift financial markets, spark revolutions or lead to war. Already, AI technology is providing hints of what might be possible.
Using the past to predict future crises
The idea of predicting the future based on patterns extracted from the past is far from new. In the first half of the 20th Century, Russian American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin pioneered a data-led approach to explain why past empires imploded. To do so, he attempted to quantify societal instability across the ages, gathering data on “micro-events”, such as political assassinations or riots, and “macro-events”, such as civil wars and revolutions. (BBC)
In the case of Ancient Rome, he used his data to make the case for what he believed caused the empire’s downfall: excessive materialism and hedonism leading to decadence and “over-ripeness”. Today, complexity scientist Peter Turchin is upholding the spirit of Sorokin’s work at Oxford University’s World History Lab in the UK. For more than a decade, Turchin and his team of researchers have amassed 80,000 pieces of qualitative and quantitative data from societies stretching back to Palaeolithic times in an effort to explain the past and predict the future.
“We’re looking for moments of crisis,” says researcher Samantha Holder, who works on the project. From the late bronze age collapse to the dissolution of the Habsburg Spanish Empire, crises are given a score to reflect their geographical reach and intensity. This data is analysed for patterns with the help of predictive computational models – a process which doesn’t currently use AI but soon could do.
Turchin’s team has used their database to propose hypotheses about why moments of crisis arise. Revolutions, they have found, tend to stem from a confluence of factors including parts of the population becoming poorer and a growing number of elites vying for a limited number of ruling positions. “If these things happen at the same time and the state has a financial crisis, revolution and civil wars become more likely,” says Holder. She cites the French Revolution as an illustrative example.