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.'"
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!
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.
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.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.