NYU’s Epstein on fear and complacency in the age of Covid

Joshua Epstein has spent decades creating mathematical models that make sense of human behaviour – from how juries convict, to what triggers mob violence. He does this using agent-based models: synthetic societies populated by avatars that try to replicate the conduct of everyday people.

Epstein, a professor of epidemiology at New York University, is now deploying his army of automatons in the