Slashdot Mirror
Simulating Societies At the Global Scale
An anonymous reader writes "Teams of European researchers are vying to create a distributed supercomputer of unprecedented scale to analyze the data that streams in from hundreds of devices and feeds (mobile, social data, market data, medical input, etc) and use it to 'run global-scale simulations of social systems.'"
Anybody guess the sponsors ?
This reminds me this excellent book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacron-3
A fellow bought a new car, a Nissan, and was quite happy with his purchase. He was something of an animist, however, and felt that the car really ought to have a name. This presented a problem, as he was not sure if the name should be masculine or feminine. After considerable thought, he settled on an naming the car either Belchazar or Beaumadine, but remained in a quandry about the final choice. "Is a Nissan male or female?" he began asking his friends. Most of them looked at him pecularly, mumbled things about urgent appointments, and went on their way rather quickly. He finally broached the question to a lady he knew who held a black belt in judo. She thought for a moment and answered "Feminine." The swiftness of her response puzzled him. "You're sure of that?" he asked. "Certainly," she replied. "They wouldn't sell very well if they were masculine." "Unhhh... Well, why not?" "Because people want a car with a reputation for going when you want it to. And, if Nissan's are female, it's like they say... `Each Nissan, she go!'" [No, we WON'T explain it; go ask someone who practices an oriental martial art. (Tai Chi Chuan probably doesn't count.) Ed.] % Aliquid melius quam pessimum optimum non est. % Der Horizont vieler Menschen ist ein Kreis mit Radius Null -- und das nennen sie ihren Standpunkt. % Ego sum ens omnipotens. % Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit. % Hodie natus est radici frater. % Honi soit la vache qui rit. % Klatu barada nikto. % Mieux vaut tard que jamais! % Qvid me anxivs svm? % Raffiniert ist der Herrgott aber boshaft ist er nicht. -- Albert Einstein % Regnant populi. % semper en excretus % SEMPER UBI SUB UBI!!!! % sillema sillema nika su % Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re. Se non e vero, e ben trovato. % Sum quod eris. % Tout choses sont dites deja, mais comme personne n'ecoute, il faut toujours recommencer. -- A. Gide % Verba volant, scripta manent! %
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Kind of like the conspiracy theorist have been talking about for the past 10 years? A global system where everybody is monitored?
Well, at least it's better than the FEMA camps, which don't exist...YET! (dun dun dun)
We just need more data to tease out the statistics in: Psychohistory. Now, is that a good thing?
Shh.
I want a large scale social simulation to be used as a test bed for proposed legislation, to give an idea whether the bill might have the desired effect and to ferret out any unintended consequences. Legislation really ought to go through the whole engineering process, not simply thrown into production without any testing.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
This sounds almost akin to the Venus Project, although a little less 'revolutionary'.
Venus' concept is a massive global supercomputer network that monitors the worlds resources, allocating them only where they are needed and in reasonable quantities, eliminating waste and misuse, but being auditing and controlled by human-elect. A different future society (although it is debatable between dystopian and utopian) could automate everything, doctors, lawyers, manufacturing, almost absolutely everything once the infrastructure is in place, and people could live simple, happier lives and not be wage-slaves. Granted it would probably a century or two of automata innovation to make something like that happen, but it would beat having such excess waste, such as cars/drivers ratio. It would be pretty neat to do what you love and love what you do without a lot of the extraneous worries.
And no I am not a communist/socialist, just saying it might be a cool alternate reality.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
we'll only need an abacus to keep track of ourselves. so that takes care of that.
It's called BOINC.
Reminds me of that old science fiction joke:
The world spent untold sums of money hooking up all the computers together into a massive global supermachine.
The day came when it was time to power it on. The most revered scientific mind flipped the switch and asked the first question:
"Is there a god?"
A lightning bolt came from a massive power terminal and fused the switch shut.
Supercomputer: "There is now!"
It's the question that's hard to find
Deep Thought designed such a device and operated it for 10 million years on behalf of pan-dimensional, hyper-intelligent race of beings, but five minutes before the simulation was complete, the Vogons pulverized it to make way for an inter-galactic bypass. The device was called, oddly, Earth. It is funny that the device and its components should choose to do the exact same thing. Sounds like bad recursion to me. I came down from the tree just to type this.
i hate to poop on slashdot's parade, but this whole thing has been tried before. and it is a disaster because it always ends in massive corruption.
for example. the CDO market was heavily built on simulations; simulations created by legions of 'quants' (math PHDs) who sat around studying models all day long for banks and hedge funds and credit ratings agencies.
the problem with these models were wrong. why were they wrong? it was not because of 'honest mistakes'. it was not because someone forgot to carry a 2 or forgot to compile glibc with the right flags.
it was rather massive collusion to game and tweak the models so that a very small number of people would make a very large amount of profit, while the economy collapsed. those people included the ratings agencies themselves, the proprietary CDO trading desks at big banks like Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank, CDO managers, certain hedge funds, etc etc etc. They all profited massively from having awful investments rated very highly; those ratings depended directly on those models. The CDOs could not have been created without those models. Those models were what enabled the entire securitization chain, from the mortgage loan, to the mortgage security tranche, to the CDO tranche, to the CDO squared, to the synthetic CDOs built on top of it all, like some gigantic 900 pound circus performer tip toeing on a beach ball.
you can read about this over, and over again .. here is a list of books that cover the topic.
The Big Short, Michael Lewis
Confidence Game, Christine S Richard
All the Devils are Here, Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera
The Greatest Trade Ever, Gregory Zuckerman
The Quants.
etc etc etc
If you go back and read about one of the original 'model based' economies, the Soviet Union, you will find similar problems. Models are invariable controlled by the politics of power, and are inherently corrupted by those politics.
The problem then is not in creating simulations; it is figuring out how you create simulations that will not be abused and perverted by sick people who want to destroy the economy for their own ideological reasons and/or personal financial gain.
After applying massive investigation and resources into studying human trends and consequences of human actions, beliefs etc., it is likely the the best conclusion will be that human activity and its consequences are completely unpredictable, irrational and largely of no value to anyone outside of the human species.
...they should contact Magrathea
I believe they have experience with this, but they're not cheap.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Simcity!
They clearly haven't considered Hayek's The Fatal Conceit, chapter 9: Our Poisoned Language. Prefixing the weasel word "social" to the term "systems" thereby deprives it of any content whatsoever. TFA reads like they really only have the vaguest clue about what it is they think they are simulating.
Mice? Or maybe the dolphins.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
..the mice. They have done it before, on a more general scale.
I have read about this in various James P. Hogan novels. It always turns out bad . . . for us.
except maybe for the part where it goes : if this doesn't work , try that ; if that works, treat anything trying anything else as strange and dangerous . the implementation of the classic fear of the dark survival mechanism. I wouldn't know what else could describe life in a few lines
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
We all know that understanding cause-and-effect in our computer+network+software systems is non-trivial.
Real-world systems are orders-of-magnitude more complex than any existing human-designed system.
Thus, passing a law that actually has a net positive effect has about the same probability as a random change to the Linux kernel has of improving Linux.