To be honest I read 1984 maybe six or seven times and I do not remeber "prediction" to be one of the main themes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime

To be honest I read 1984 maybe six or seven times and I do not remeber "prediction" to be one of the main themes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughtcrime The oppressive regime of 1984 does not use math or computers to look for "suspects". We might argue this was because Orwell had no idea about these methods (book was written in 1948, after all) but personally I doubt he would have used this because advocating decisions to an impersonal algorithm would make the bad guys slightly less bad: in the novel the main baddie says something like "do you want to see the future of Human Race? Think of a boot stomping on a human face, forever...". I.e. power for them is a end in itself, and the only way to use it is to make someone else suffer. I don't see any place for "impersonal algorithms to better adjudicate anything" in this.