Simulating Societies At the Global Scale 64
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.'"
Re:Deus Machina (Score:4, Informative)
Reminds me of that old science fiction joke:
Not a joke, sheesh. It's the short story Answer, by Fredric Brown. Find it here. [wordpress.com] Know your classics!
Re:Venus Project (Score:2, Informative)
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.