-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: July 1, 2007 10:31:29 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Pentagon Wants to Turn Us into SIMs -- Get An Ant Farm,
Already!
Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale
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.
A commercial version of the program underlying SWS is available
through Simulex, Inc. It is called "Synthetic Environment for
Analysis and Simulations", or SEAS. Simulex's #1 customer is, not
suprisingly, the US Government. (Via Cryptogon.)
I do not doubt that the US Government is monitoring all email
traffic, the entire web, and probably most of our phone calls as
well. All of this data will be tracked and analysed using the
most sophisticated artificial intelligence programs available.
We do not have their resources but we do have one thing they lack--
real intelligence. They are trying to locate a needle in a haystack
and their approach is to keep adding more hay.
------------------
http://www.theregister.com/2007/06/23/sentient_worlds/print.html
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 (http://www.darpa.mil) and
discussing it with officials at the US Department of Homeland
Security (http://www.dhs.gov), 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",
(http://www.jfcom.mil/about/experiments/nobleresolve.html) a
homeland defense experiment.
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
(http://www.jfcom.mil/about/experiments/uresolve.htm), 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 asymmetric 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." ®
Related stories
Jock Stirrup: Eco apocalypse will mean more wars (25 June 2007)
http://www.theregister.com/2007/06/25/
climate_change_means_war_say_forces/
UK invades California in cyber MMORPG wargame (16 June 2007)
http://www.theregister.com/2007/06/16/cwid_uk_thin_pipe_mmorpg/
Military love affair with videogames intensifies (9 June 2007)
http://www.theregister.com/2007/06/09/
xbox_controller_warbot_n_military_gaming/
Role-players amok in Second Life (18 April 2007)
http://www.theregister.com/2007/04/18/role_play_in_sl/
Military thinktank sees dark future (11 April 2007)
http://www.theregister.com/2007/04/11/admiral_nostradamus_parry/
See what's free at AOL.com.
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