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Thursday, June 3, 2010

War / Games The Sims Meets Minority Report

Posted by The Stranger Testing Department on Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 11:52 AM

The U.S. military has been using video games for training for a long time, but what's happening in one anonymous village in Afghanistan is completely different: Barry Silverman, a game-savvy engineering prof at the University of Pennsylvania, is building a video-game-style computer model of an actual village to predict real-world outcomes, using data collected by "human terrain mapping" teams that interview and study Afghans.

If you want Rustam to make with the tea, you need to knock down his health meter.

If you want Rustam to make with the tea, you need to knock down his health meter.

He believes that one day, "the whole of southern Afghanistan will be recreated in a vast computer model. 'I think the goal in the long run would be to just crank out village after village,' he said." And that prompts worried speculation by some social scientists: “Are we going to detain someone if a computer predicts that he will become an insurgent?’’ asked Hugh Gusterson, an anthropologist at George Mason University.

But who cares, because this whole thing can't possibly work. Can it?

In the past decade, a US agency has paid [Silverman] to model the Palestinian intifada, Al Qaeda figures, leaders in the Middle East, and 27 Iraqi political figures. In 2008, he was asked to make detailed guesses about events in Bangladesh, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, based on his models. The US agency measured his forecasts against real events, and they turned out to be more than 80 percent accurate, he said.

There's no word on how that 80% compares to educated guesses without computer models (and the models of course are only as good as the "human terrain" data provided), but the point remains: this is some crazy shit.

The Stranger Testing Department is Rob Lightner and Paul Hughes.

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Comments (11) RSS

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We won't detain them if they're predicted to become an insurgent in the civil war in Afghanistan.

We'll kill them. By mistake.

Because, when you're doing foreign wars of adventure in countries that have no al-Qaeda, that's what you do.

If only they would run this sim on Saudi Arabia ...

Posted by Will in Seattle

on June 3, 2010 at 11:59 AM

It sounds like someone has been reading too much of the FOUNDATION series without paying attention to what Asimov was really saying.

Posted by slaggy

on June 3, 2010 at 12:00 PM

Singularity can't be far off now. I hope it happens in time to save me from old age.

Posted by TVDinner

on June 3, 2010 at 12:01 PM

@3 there's a game for that. Comes out this month.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on June 3, 2010 at 12:05 PM

@slaggy--that's exactly what I was thinking when I read this!

Posted by Mittens Schrodinger on June 3, 2010 at 12:10 PM

@4 He is talking about the technological Singularity, not a gravitational singularity or a video game called "Singularity."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technologic…

If you really read into the technological singularity there will be a short period of some pretty insane shit happening before the computers take over. Some of the more disturbing things I can think of are the fact that mind reading through nano-bot scanning is 100% certain to happen and mind control using similar nano-bots is ALMOST certain to happen before the eventual singularity.

Who needs computer models like in Minority Report to tell you that someone will become a criminal when you can simply detect at the exact moment when they make the decision?

Also FWIW if you are under the age of 40 you are almost certain to see it assuming nothing traumatic or acute kills you first.

Posted by Packeteer on June 3, 2010 at 12:20 PM

Fwiw, we were talking about game sims - so the reference to "Singularity" by default would be to the game that comes out this month, not to something else.

Given the bandwidth constraints in this third world nation (USA), I'm not that worried about the computers taking over, especially if they're running Flash apps on Windows 7.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on June 3, 2010 at 12:28 PM

@6: She.

Posted by TVDinner

on June 3, 2010 at 12:30 PM

Put this post together with the Big Dog and Little Dog robot posts and Obama's preference for drone warfare, and we have a picture of what our future soldiers' working lives will be. Staying put here at home, well-trained and safe from politically risky physical harm, gently influencing impoverished villagers throughout the world via armed robot dog mouthpieces, posting comments on Slog during their breaks.

Pax Americana indeed.

Posted by gloomy gus on June 3, 2010 at 12:34 PM

How do we know the whole world isn't already just a vast computer model of village after village (and city after city) playing in some extra-dimensional being's laptop?

Also, where's my pot?

Posted by Urgutha Forka on June 3, 2010 at 12:58 PM