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:Venus Project (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Psychohistory. (Score:2, Insightful)
[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?
Re:Venus Project (Score:4, Insightful)
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.