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.'"

Comments

Psychohistory.

[headkase]

We just need more data to tease out the statistics in: Psychohistory. Now, is that a good thing?

Re:Psychohistory.

[Tynin]

We just need more data to tease out the statistics in: Psychohistory. Now, is that a good thing?

Asimov on psychohistory

"Well, I can't help but think it would be good, except that in my stories, I always have opposing views. In other words, people argue all possible... all possible... ways of looking at psychohistory and deciding whether it is good or bad. So you can't really tell. I happen to feel sort of on the optimistic side. I think if we can somehow get across some of the problems that face us now, humanity has a glorious future, and that if we could use the tenets of psychohistory to guide ourselves we might avoid a great many troubles. But on the other hand, it might create troubles. It's impossible to tell in advance."
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)#Asimov_on_psychohistory

I tend to agree with him. In the end, the information is out there, and someone is going to put it together. To what ends remains to be see.

Re:Psychohistory.

[Anonymous Coward]

[Note to mods: if you haven't read Asimov's Foundation series, or at least Foundation and Empire, just skip to the next post.]

Good advice for anyone

What's your native language - Fortran?

Legislation Engineering

[Ichijo]

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.

Re:Legislation Engineering

[VortexCortex]

Why not just turn off the computer, and systematically try out each new legislation in a different state/province/city/etc. before adopting it for the whole of the Nation -- Multiple trials can be executed simultaneously if needed.

There's really no reason the whole of the nation (or its economic future) should be at stake due to crappy laws... Oh, that's right -- Equal rights means everyone must all have the same rights always everywhere or else --- or else -- or else state/county/township and other local laws could be applied to individuals depending on where they live, and that's not fair, wait, what did I just say?

Re:Legislation Engineering

[Alex Belits]

Are you a moron?

To make any kind of meaningful experiment, you have to prevent interaction with the outside world -- otherwise all you will see is people exploiting the differences. This is also a reason why plenty of laws that would make sense, are not implemented on US States' level -- because then hordes of people will find a way to abuse the difference between that state and its neighbors. What also means that "states' rights" are a ridiculous concept, and Americans would do better by focusing on improving things on Federal level, even if it means taking over the "states' rights" turning States into what they really are -- provinces.

Venus Project

[cosm]

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.

Re:Venus Project

[DigiShaman]

Well, if and when we have automated AI at that level, it would be a true form of Communism in the way Carl Marx would approve of. It would, in the history of mankind be the first successful implementation of it once the human element is removed from the vacuum of power. Assuming that's even possible. But a couple of questions still nag me.

1. How will the AI judge supply and demand when it's in complete control of resource allocation? How will it enough what's too little and too much?

2. With such a system in place, won't that eliminate incentive based human goals that leads to innovation? Are we sure that we want to hand over that role/power to a machine? That's an awful amount of trust to place in what amounts to a demigod. In effect, we are trusting it to decide our future and shape of civilization. Could be a good thing, could be bad.

Re:Venus Project

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I think the robo-communism idea is another useless exercise in naive fantasy, you are clearly just another political parrot who spouts off his pre-packaged, trite expositions whenever he hears the relevant key word. In this case, you heard "communism" and proceeded to explain why communism hasn't worked in the most cliched, tired way possible. However, your exposition is not really useful in the case since the GP was discussing a unique scenario in which people would not be in charge of the state, but rather a computer. And he was not saying that people would happily go along with the computer, but that the computer could actually pull off the centralized planning and security needed to make it happen, whether people want it or not.

Re:Venus Project

[cosm]

Those are definitely the two major arguments I think. In regards to resource allocation, theres what I like to call the 'greed' problem. Commune A puts in a machine order to X units. Commune B decides it needs X+1, a runnoff occurs and at some point the machine has to intervene and make a decision as to who gets what.

As far as innovation goes, I think from a science standpoint, core science would still innovate, those like Curie, Einstein, Newton, Tesla, Feynman, Planck, etc, most innovated not for monetary gain. However, many engineering pursuits are done out of need for financial profit. But then again, NASA wasn't about getting rich (although nationalistic pride would be down the hole), but hopefully by that time we would have transgressed past nationalistic pissing-contest societal and scientific development, and doing things truly for the betterment of humanity. Very interesting questions and definitely much room for speculation.

I guess the largest question is, would humanity's happiness and longevity be increased, excluding the possibility that the two are mutually exclusive?

Re:Venus Project

[cosm]

That is another big question. In an almost completely automated world, would there be enough voluntary contributers doing it for the love of science and humanity to prop up the 90% of the population who sit at home glued to 'Ow my balls'? Who knows.

Re:Venus Project

[Anonymous Coward]

Prop them up how? If the "means of production" are completely automated it shouldn't be necessary for anyone to prop up anyone else. This is actually how Marx envisioned Communism, except he used the example of people being free to hunt and fish. So few people seem to actually read Marx or understand his analysis of history, it's like we already live in an Idiocracy...

Quick lesson: According to Marx there is a kind of trajectory to the history of economics (or, political economy, if you prefer). This trajectory starts in pre-Capitalist traditionalist economic systems, then Capitalism emerges and supplants the pre-Capitalist systems. Over time, Capitalism expands productive capacity until it ultimately undermines itself in a fundamental way, this process is what produces Communism. In other words, the success of Capitalism creates Communism. Or in still other words, Capitalism increases the productive capacity of society to the point where it transcends the necessity of work.

Re:Venus Project

[Alex Belits]

The situation now in so-called developed countries is approximately this:

1% contributes in any meaningful way,
90% does what a machine would do better but a human has to because otherwise he will have no money and no means for survival,
9% actively tries to steal from everyone else, 1% (out of the aforementioned 9%) succeeds and controls at least 50% of everything that people need to be productive, 8% (out of the same 9%) fails but still shits everything up.

Letting 90% just sit on their asses and do nothing would be a great improvement.

Re:Venus Project

[Dr Max]

2. With such a system in place, won't that eliminate incentive based human goals that leads to innovation? Are we sure that we want to hand over that role/power to a machine? That's an awful amount of trust to place in what amounts to a demigod. In effect, we are trusting it to decide our future and shape of civilization. Could be a good thing, could be bad.

I agree the trust issue would be hard to over come and it could defiantly be a bad system completely ignoring the needs of the few. But given a correctly programed demigod, incentive could be replaced with more of an honor type system if you have everything looked after for you (well cooked food, shelter, fast internet, entertainment, recreation, retirement) all you have left for life is your achievements. This doesn't solve all the problems of the less glamorous jobs (which more and more should be done by robots) that still need to be done, but if you give those people an excess of free time you could get some takers (some people just want to go fishing or watch TV). The super computer could be the ultimate accountant/treasurer/advisor.

I think something like this has already been done.

[mmell]

It's called BOINC.

Re:Deus Machina

[ChatHuant]

Reminds me of that old science fiction joke:

Not a joke, sheesh. It's the short story Answer, by Fredric Brown. Find it here. Know your classics!

Re:Oh great...

[Dr Max]

I'm sure Google has already started their own.