Machine-learning systems can detect signs of mental health conditions from our digital activity.

An algorithm may identify a pattern without understanding the broader living system and influences shaping it.

The challenge may be protecting the boundary around what others are permitted to infer.

Almost 80 years have passed since George Orwell published his classic science fiction novel that imagined a dystopian threat to privacy by a controlling government that maintained constant monitoring of its citizens—along with imposing personalized tortures of a person’s greatest nightmare when they did not conform. Orwell depicted the frightening future to take place just over 30 years after the book’s birth: 1984.

Looking at his life, it may not have been such a strange prediction, as he lived through World War I, the Great Depression, and then World War II, which had officially ended a few years before he drafted the book. Not only did Orwell witness and survive recurring patterns of war and suffering, but he also saw the atrocities grow larger and more destructive.

For instance, when WWI ended on November 11, 1918, in the 11th hour, people celebrated Armistice Day and called it “the war to end all wars.” But the Great Depression followed a decade later. And an even greater war, WWII, kicked off a decade after that—and culminated in horrors unimaginable and two atomic bombs that revealed we could decimate entire populations—and destroy the planet while doing it.

Looking at the events of Orwell’s life, it can be easier to infer how he could imagine a government so frightening and controlling. We can all play pseudo-psychologist when we read books or watch movies and wonder what the writer was thinking or ponder their state of mind. Sometimes a person has a more inside scoop to the person, like the Disney producer, Don Hahn, who made the connection to Walt Disney’s........

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