Sentient World: War Games on the Grandest Scale
July 28, 2007
You have to read this article from the UK Register to believe it:
Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale
Okay, this story has my psychopath detector going off full force. Threat level RED!
It would seem that the psychopathic ruling elites are getting seriously paranoid. They want to be absolutely sure that they have all the possible scenarios covered before they unleash the economic disasters, bio-weapons, neutron bombs, famines or other nightmares upon us.
I mean what the hell, an exact parallel world simulation modelled one to one for every person on the planet that feeds real-time
data from the world into it.
And of course there is the opportunity for people to "voluntarily" contribute in their profiles and information to this system. As Aldous Huxley said, in his 1962 speech on scientific dictatorship, the people must be made to love their servitude.
I'm sure this will fit in perfectly with their plans to have us all brain chipped as discussed at meetings at Loyola University several years ago. Won't it be great to have the tracking software already done and available so once they convince us to take a chip, they can just throw the switch and we will all be one with the
Borg.
Holy crap, my speech recognition software recognizes the word Borg. I think I'm going to blow a blood vessel ;-0
And gee, isn't it a surprise that the primary funding is coming from the US government and that they are simulating crises on the US mainland.
Apparently, the software doesn't work very well. They are running scenarios for Baghdad in 2015 rather than 2007 when it might actually do some good. Oh, I forgot they don't ever plan to leave Iraq so maybe they should be running scenarios for 2095 as well.
I think I better stop now before I start yelling at the computer.
Since there is a nasty tendency for important and telling news articles to disappear from the original site, the original article follows:
Perhaps your real life is so rich you don't have time for another.
Even so, the US Department of Defense (DOD) may already be creating a copy of you
in an alternate reality to see how long you can go without food or water, or how
you will respond to televised propaganda.
The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual "nodes"
to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality
and AR.
Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the
real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world
information", according to a concept paper for the project.
"SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP)," the
paper reads, so that military leaders can "develop and test multiple courses of
action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners".
SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street
corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers
believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.
SEAS can display regional results for public opinion polls, distribution of retail
outlets in urban areas, and the level of unorganization of local economies, which
may point to potential areas of civil unrest
Yank a country's water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens
next.
"The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions
between multiple sides," said Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, co-author
of the SWS concept paper.
Chaturvedi directs Purdue's laboratories for Synthetic Environment for Analysis
and Simulations, or SEAS - the platform underlying SWS. Chaturvedi also makes a
commercial version of SEAS available through his company, Simulex, Inc.
SEAS users can visualise the nodes and scenarios in text boxes and graphs, or as
icons set against geographical maps.
Corporations can use SEAS to test the market for new products, said Chaturvedi.
Simulex lists the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and defense contractor Lockheed
Martin among its private sector clients.
The US government appears to be Simulex's number one customer, however. And Chaturvedi
has received millions of dollars in grants from the military and the National Science
Foundation to develop SEAS.
Chaturvedi is now pitching SWS to DARPA and discussing it with officials at the
US Department of Homeland Security, where he said the idea has been well received,
despite the thorny privacy issues for US citizens.
In fact, Homeland Security and the Defense Department are already using SEAS to
simulate crises on the US mainland.
The Joint Innovation and Experimentation Directorate of the US Joint Forces Command
(JFCOM-J9) in April began working with Homeland Security and multinational forces
over "Noble Resolve 07", a homeland defense experiment.
SEAS (as will SWS) provides figures for specific economic sectors, and helps military,
intel and marketing people visualize their global connections. Users can vary export
and import figures for manufactured goods, for example, to gauge the potential impacts
on other sectors.
In August, the agencies will shift their crises scenarios from the East Coast to
the Pacific theatre.
JFCOM-J9 completed another test of SEAS last year. Called Urban Resolve, the experiment
projected warfare scenarios for Baghdad in 2015, eight years from now.
JFCOM-9 is now capable of running real-time simulations for up to 62 nations, including
Iraq, Afghanistan, and China. The simulations gobble up breaking news, census data,
economic indicators, and climactic events in the real world, along with proprietary
information such as military intelligence.
Military and intel officials can introduce fictitious agents into the simulations
(such as a spike in unemployment, for example) to gauge their destabilising effects
on a population.
Officials can also "inject an earthquake or a tsunami and observe their impacts
(on a society)", Chaturvedi added.
Jim Blank, modelling and simulation division chief at JFCOM-J9, declined to discuss
the specific routines military commanders are running in the Iraq and Afghanistan
computer models. He did say SEAS might help officers determine where to position
snipers in a city square, or to envision scenarios that might emerge from widespread
civil unrest.
SEAS helps commanders consider the multitude of variables and outcomes possible
in urban warfare, said Blank.
"Future wars will be asymetric in nature. They will be more non-kinetic, with the
center of gravity being a population." '
The Iraq and Afghanistan computer models are the most highly developed and complex
of the 62 available to JFCOM-J9. Each has about five million individual nodes representing
things such as hospitals, mosques, pipelines, and people.
The other SEAS models are far less detailed, encompassing only a few thousand nodes
altogether, Blank said.
Feeding a whole-Earth simulation will be a colossal challenge.
"(SWS) is a hungry beast," Blank said. "A lot of data will be required to make this
thing even credible."
Alok Chaturvedi wants SWS to match every person on the planet, one-to-one.
Right now, the 62 simulated nations in SEAS depict humans as composites, at a 100-to-1
ratio.
One organisation has achieved a one-to-one level of granularity for its simulations,
according to Chaturvedi: the US Army, which is using SEAS to identify potential
recruits.
Chaturvedi insists his goal for SWS is to have a depersonalised likeness for each
individual, rather than an immediately identifiable duplicate. If your town census
records your birthdate, job title, and whether you own a dog, SWS will generate
what Chaturvedi calls a "like someone" with the same stats, but not the same name.
Of course, government agencies and corporations can add to SWS whatever personally-identifiable
information they choose from their own databases, and for their own purposes.
And with consumers already giving up their personal information regularly to websites
such as MySpace and Twitter, it is not a stretch to imagine SWS doing the same thing.
"There may be hooks through which individuals may voluntarily contribute information
to SWS," Chaturvedi said.
SEAS bases its AI "thinking" on the theories of cognitive psychologists and the
work of Princeton University professor Daniel Kahneman, one of the fathers of behavioural
economics.
Chaturvedi, as do many AR developers, also cites the work of positive psychology
guru Martin Seligman (known, too, for his concept of "learned hopelessness") as
an influence on SEAS human behaviour models. The Simulex website says, if a bit
vaguely, SEAS similarly incorporates predictive models based upon production, marketing,
finance and other fields.
But SWS may never be smart enough to anticipate every possibility, or predict how
people will react under stress, said Philip Lieberman, professor of cognitive and
linguistic studies at Brown University.
"Experts make 'correct' decisions under time pressure and extreme stress that are
not necessarily optimum but work," said Lieberman, who nevertheless said the simulations
might be useful for anticipating some scenarios.
JFCOM's Blank agreed that SWS, which is using computers and code to do cultural
anthropology, does not include any "hard science at this point".
"Ultimately," said Blank, "the guy to make decision is the commander."