I'm completely clueless about "supply chain optimisation" but I wonder whether it involves more automated processes, than human beings? I'm asking, because the

I'm completely clueless about "supply chain optimisation" but I wonder whether it involves more automated processes, than human beings? I'm asking, because the article does focus on tools used to predict human behaviour (as I think you note as you say it focuses on a different area). Predicting human behaviour is hard. I imagine that it's far easier to predict the behaviour of an artificial system, or a process, whose rules are (... more or less ... ) known. For example, I imagine that predicting, say, the rate of defects of a certain product coming out of some factory's production line, is not that hard to do -given enough data etc. And then, most of the time there's probably many fewer ethical and social issues to consider in such cases. I'm saying probably! Since I don't know the subject at all. But it's clear that there are social issues in, e.g., predicting recidivism or making automated decisions about taking children into foster care.