“Scientists are planning to use the largest supercomputers to simulate life on Earth, including the financial system, economies and whole societies. The project is called “Living Earth Simulator” and part of a huge EU research initiative named FuturIcT.
Supercomputers are already being used to explore complex social and economic problems that science can understand in no other way. For example, ETH Zurich’s professor for transport engineering Kay Axhausen is simulating the travel activities of all 7.5 Million inhabitants of Switzerland to forecast and mitigate traffic congestion. Other researchers at the ETH — all working within its Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems (CCSS) — are mining huge amounts of financial data to detect dangerous bubbles in stock and housing markets, potential bankruptcy cascades in networks of companies, or similar vulnerabilities in other complex networks such as communication networks or the Internet.
In the past, supercomputers have been used mainly in physics or biology, or for difficult engineering problems such as the construction of new aircrafts. But now they are increasingly being used for social and economic analyses, even of the most fundamental human processes. At the CCSS, for example, Lars-Erik Cederman uses large-scale computer models to study the origin of international conflict, and is creating a large database documenting the geographic interdependencies of civil violence and wars in countries such as the former Yugoslavia or Iraq. In sociology, simulations at the CCSS have explored the conditions under which cooperation and solidarity can thrive in societies. They show that the crust of civilization is disturbingly vulnerable. These simulations reveal common patterns behind breakdowns of social order in events as diverse as the war in former Yugoslavia, lootings after earthquakes or other natural disasters, or the recent violent demonstrations in Greece.”
Read more at Science Daily
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What if we’re already in the simulation.. and the simulation that we’re in is so advanced we think we’re real, and so this simulation of “Life on Earth” is a simulation of a simulation. Wow.. my head hurts
Terry Pratchett already wrote about a very similar device in Makin Money. Didn’t think it would be long until someone created itnon real life.
Terry Pratchett may very well have read Nick Bostrom’s Simulated Universe theory which does exactly what is happening to Vinyarbs head right now: http://www.simulation-argument.com/
Kinda lame if you already know the answer will be 42.
@Vinyarb: So The Matrix is real?!?! ohhh dear god! haha
As processing power increases, we will IMHO increasingly rely on mathematical models to manage resources. As social engineering is guided by amoral systems, some quite effective but exceptionally unpleasant suggestions will have to be considered.
Eugenics, economic expansionism, population growth management, war, all are potential answers to the problems we face.
I have no doubt that intellectuals and politicians in think tanks already think the unthinkable.
What happens when a computer tells us that the undesirable or unpleasant is actually unavoidable?
e.g. wipe out so-and-so country with nukes to prevent further destabilisation.
Plant crop monocultures all over Africa to feed Europe.
Would we be able to say ‘no’ to a machine? It only takes one person to say ‘yes’.
What are you saying, Rob? That you would rather avoid a solution that is in the short term ‘unpleasant’ for some people, even if the computer calculates it as optimal in the long term in the interest of the majority?
If the computer is asked to calculate the course of action that would lead to the highest biological fitness for the most people across the world (given the data put into the model), then by default it is selecting the most pleasant course of action. This follows logically.
Also, what makes you think “It only takes one person to say ‘yes’.” That sounds presumptive to me. A computer would only serve to provide advice for leaders; it wouldn’t physically take control. At no point did anyone mention a machine.
at first i read this as “stimulate”–yee haw!!!
I don’t buy this. Sofar science hasn’t understood much of so many things. Everything they predicts with their programs does not work at all like that in real life. Thank God. Or thanks to ourselves, to life I should say.
Ofcourse there are things in which computers are playing a majore role, lots of things in life, but it wont drive people, nor its reasons for doing things the way they do them. Let alone a few. The ones that adapt a bit too much to modern world, its techniques.
They can not even predict the weather …
It’s gonna be a hell of a pc game I guess.
Or you call it – The Sims 4 -
Perhaps they might consider asking this supercomputer a question from me?
1. The Banks went bust.
2. Governments bailed out the Banks with money they did not have.
3. So they borrowed it from the Banks, and now we have to pay it back.
Q. Where did the money Banks lent Governments come from?
p.s. It isn’t 42. It’s a thirteen word sentence.