Decoding, hacking, and optimizing societies: Exploring potential applications of human data analytics in sociological engineering, both internally and as offensive weapons

Today's unprecedented wealth of data on human activities, augmented by proven reliable methods of algorithmically extrapolating personal information from limited data, and the means to store and analyze it opens up new vistas for in-depth understanding of individuals, as well as the potential generation of predictive models for the dynamics of human functions on individual, group, and societal scales. This has already proven to have applications in successfully forecasting behavior, techniques which are only likely to improve. To the extent that the science can move beyond a correlative understanding of the data to a causal understanding of the factors affecting behavior, it will allow new means for (perhaps covertly and deniably) influencing behavior, possibly through long causal chains that could conceal the influence of the manipulator. This offers an immense variety of applications, but this paper will particularly consider them as tools in governmental control over their citizens and as a new form of weaponry.