On Predicting the future

When I was in high school I read a series of books by Isaac Asimov called the Foundation series. In these books Asimov did his classic thing, where he invents a Sci-Fi concept that sounds vaguely plausible to drive the plot. This technology was psychohistory, the ability to predict what large groups of people would do with data. Over the course of the story, another group within the foundation, the second foundation, refined the mathematical formulas so well they could run them for an individual person. This was a form of mind control.