This book discusses the study of human society using methods from physics, analyzing and predicting human social behavior through a large amount of monitoring data.
Although the book draws analogies to physics, I feel it is more akin to biology or evolutionary theory. Through extensive data monitoring, it has been found that for human society to innovate, there needs to be sufficient communication among individuals with diverse and unique ideas, which means that diversity is essential, and multiple connections are necessary. This is somewhat similar to biological evolution, where organisms must maintain diversity to adapt to various environments, and interactions among organisms are crucial to promote beneficial mutations for evolution.
The biggest challenge in studying human society is data access rights. Most existing data is concentrated in the hands of governments and large enterprises, and ordinary people have little control over their own data. Data privacy is difficult to ensure, and interoperability between data is also challenging. Legislation can address some issues, but it is hard to achieve both the prevention of data misuse and the full utilization of data simultaneously.