Image: Photograph by Dan Saelinger
In Brief
- Researchers plan to build a computing system that would model the entire world to predict the future.
- The project would be powered by the enormous data streams now available to researchers.
- Yet models are not perfect; many researchers think they will never be able to capture the world’s complexities.
- A better knowledge machine may arise out of Web-like principles such as interconnection and argument.
In the summer and fall of last year, the Greek financial crisis tore at the seams of the global economy. Having run up a debt that it would never be able to repay, the country faced a number of potential outcomes, all unpleasant. Efforts to slash spending spurred riots in the streets of Athens, while threats of default rattled global financial markets. Many economists argued that Greece should leave the euro zone and devalue its currency, a move that would in theory help the economy grow. “Make no mistake: an orderly euro exit will be hard,” wrote New York University economist Nouriel Roubini in the Financial Times. “But watching the slow disorderly implosion of the Greek economy and society will be much worse.”
No one was sure exactly how the scenario would play out, though. Fear spread that if Greece were to abandon the euro, Spain and Italy might do the same, weakening the central bond of the European Union. Yet the Economist opined that the crisis would “bring more fiscal-policy control from Brussels, turning the euro zone into a more politically integrated club.” From these consequences would come yet further-flung effects. Migrants heading into the European Union might shift their travel patterns into a newly affordable Greece. A drop in tourism could limit the spread of infectious disease. Altered trade routes could disrupt native ecosystems. The question itself is simple—Should Greece drop the euro?—but the potential fallout is so far-reaching and complex that even the world’s sharpest minds found themselves unable to grasp all the permutations.
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32 Comments
Add CommentThis reminds me of;Colossus the Forbin Project.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat was a really bad movie, too!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am asking for two point two billion dollars. This would initiate positive outcomes to the continuation of earth changes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor instance;
"Let’s do what we can to help. " and this is my contribution;
As the world is and will be experiencing Earth Changes, we, they and them, must also change.
Changes in where and when to plant our food.
Changes in that we live in a mobile environment and yes ridiculous as it sounds, the likes of mobile orange groves!
With a mobile world the thing now needed is the Science to tell us when and where to move and thats where I come in.
I have trudged through the barren lands of Canada’s Arctic and have seen evidence that this land in times past was subject to salt water ocean, evidence of prehistoric inhabitants that would indicate a tropical environment.
California sure gets around doesn’t it!
In the year ? mammoths are thriving in warm sunny California when an asteroid hits the Earth and because of debris blocking the sun an ice age develops, (hard to swallow that one!) How about the one that describes volcano activity (not that one either.) OK how about plate tectonics where California slides up to the north pole (that’s harder yet.)
You have a choice here, You can either believe that the Arctic was once hot (that damn global warming thing again) and believe the garbage of plate tectonics. Or you can consider my science in that the Earth moves around on its North South magnetic Axis changing its exposure to both Sun and Moon.
Sorry for bursting bubbles again but the havoc and land movement of whats named Earthquake comes from a tone of sound interacting with the Earths Magnetic field.
If you have experienced an earthquake and do the following experiment you to will realize that it is the interaction of whats named magnetism and tone of sound that produces the movement of an earthquake.
If you are rich or funded purchase a large crystal bowl and a cow or cattle magnet. This experiment will shock the pants off of you. If your poor like the rest of us find some one in sound therapy and get them to gong their bowl. They will want to show how they can change the tone of sound with their gonger. Having your turn hold the magnet in your fist and make circles in the bowl. As the tone changes there will be a point where raw energy is produced and the magnet will be jumping around in your hand. It is this that causes the movement of an earthquake, Not the scrunching of rock!
Considering the likes of a Tsunami warning and where and when to plant food, ski etc.
It is of GREAT IMPORTANCE to establish a constant monitoring system for Canada's North Magnetic Pole Movements.
Bruce Voigt Science
It is nice to discuss about this argument, but even if theoretically this machine could be possible, unfortunately it will be always impossible to build it, because the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states a fundamental limit on the accuracy with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle can be simultaneously known. Every event depends from a previous event, but for us human beings it will be impossible to know and to predict events which are smaller than the limit of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. They are those things that people call AT RANDOM !
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSubscribe, Subscribe Subscribe! Why don't they get a bum with a guitar and a tin can so they can make their money. I do subscribe but how can anyone who doesn't participate in the conversation. I predict that if SCIAM continues to do this they will be left to youtube copies of past issues and when they do the 150, 100 and 50 years ago when the date is 2112 it will be remarked as the year SCIAM went under.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is not an obligation to subscribe, and the world today is full of advertising everywhere. So it is not Scientific American that must stop advertising, but people which read it must get use of it. If there were no more advertising it should be impossible to give scientific news and ideas. You should know that without money is impossible to go on in every initiative.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI hear you and I have said I have subscribed to Sciam since 1972 but as I also said it becomes more and more like USA today and I can read Discovery if I want Science for the Scientifically Challenged. They have plenty of advertising on every page but when they put something in their News category I don't expect to get a Subscribe tease instead of a story. It is kind of funny at one point I had a stack that was close to 6 feet high of Sciam and felt that since I could use the web I did not need to keep the stack and donated it to the library. Now if I want to go back to an article it is either lost or I have to pay for it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust for fun try to find the story they ran about a year ago discussing the science of custom tipping viruses that could become batteries, displays, speakers, keyboards, storage devices etc... Can't find it any where and the only use I have heard of to date is the military is using it. Can you feel my pain. I understand that by dumbing down they can attract a larger audience but we lose what was at one time a serious in depth look at the work of real scientist and are left with one to four page teasers of what is going on. It is bad enough that the paper book is almost dead and soon the real news papers *NYT has less followers than Huffington post.
At some point paper will be gone and as new devices appear to display information selected information will not follow leaving us without a heritage. Something like trying to read an 8 track tape with a BluRay machine. I am a so called tree hugger but books are our legacy and as long as we have eyes we can hold on to the information. I fear for where we are heading and I doubt XBox or WII gives 2 nickels on being deposits of knowledge.
I guess I am becoming an old foggy in my foggy days... But I love books and they can be translated by light, eyes and someone who can read. Ones and Zeroes can be read only by the medium they are selected for.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow about this clown uses his own dime and reaps all the profits and knowledge he discovers,why does the Private sector get all the benefits and society takes the risks .As with LHC, ISS, Hubble etc,etc
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFuturICT has more than 900 supporters from various scientific areas,
among them many leading scientists from all over
the world. I don't think it can be reduced to a science fiction dream of a single person.
The Living Earth Simulator is not trying to simulate all details of the
world. Rather, it will extend already existing large-scale simulations of human activity patterns and transport, of epidemic spreading and the like. Once the simulations reach global dimensions, the Living Earth Simulator will connect them in order to get a better
picture of the systemic interdependencies in our world. In no ways it should be thought of as an exact prediction of the future, so the comparison with a crystal ball is in my oppinion inappropriate.
The Living Earth Simulator is also not the core asset of the FuturICT project. It is one
of three equally important components: the Planetary Nervous System (to
sense and understand), the Living Earth Simulator (to model and
simulate), and the Global Participatory System (to explore and
interact).
Neither the data nor the project will be centrally organized!
FuturICT makes it a point to provide open access to data and new services. It relies on self-organization and collaboration of a multi-disciplinary community working towards a joint vision, but
supporting multiple perspectives.
On the modeling front, the project does not only build on advances in
traffic modeling. Apart from traffic theory, Dirk Helbing has been working on disaster response management, social cooperation, social norms, social conflict, collective behavior and opinion formation. Among the scientists supporting the project there is an exciting diversity of research interests. Combining these scientific efforts is a difficult task, but doutbless worth the try!
As a remark, the driver assistant system to dissolve traffic jams suggested by Dirk Helbing does not require impossibly small distances between vehicles. The system is
already being tested by Volkswagen and its results are promising. There are other solutions that have proven to be extremely
successful in practice, in the area of production, crowd management, and
traffic light control. Multiplying this by 900 supporters shows the real potential of this international project.
Anybody remember how great the language ADA was going to be. I got into to trouble at NASA when I was showing the programmers how well written C programs would run about 1000 times faster than ADA and also be about 1000 times more reliable. Anything that can predict everything is bound to predict nothing correctly except the time twice a day.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe live in a world that is affected at both the quantum and the relativistic rules and can only account for 2 to 4% of what is out there. So how is this machine going to account for the 96% of what we don't know?
If they are going to give this guy a billion Euros to build the machine I want to sell them a bridge that spans from Manhattan to Brooklyn for a million Euro's but only if they still have some value after Greece, Italy and Spain takes the whole continent down the tubes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think I can probably predict another war between European countries on the horizon based on how well the economies are working. That should be worth a half a million Euro's; don't you think?
This sounds like a great project, that should definitely be taken to fruition, simply for the advances it will bring in data handling/manipulation and an improved understanding of how the world works. In terms of predicting the future, it doesn't really make any difference and consequentially, how it's done won't make much difference either. While some prediction capability might come of it, no one will pay attention - Look at global climate change. And there are still people (even scientists) who argue the science. Would this be any different. If the predictions don't suite the readers personal desires, the more the predictions will be questioned, especially, as noted, you can't predict disasters, natural or manmade - earthquake, tsunami, volcano or 9/11, so allowing the "unbeliever" holes to poke at. The more powerful, financially, politically, socially, etc. the "unbeliever" (read - doesn't suite my personal fortune making scheme) is, like climate change, the less notice will be taken.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is an old saying that goes if you want to know what and why follow the money. That is a much cheaper approach to predicting the future and much more accurate. As far as predicting nature, good luck; nature does as nature wants and we so far have only grasped at best 4% of what the universe is made of.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI do believe we can spend good money on finding ways to create power that leaves big oil out of the picture but again I go back to follow the money so that ideal becomes folly. The minute we gave corporations the same rights as people we sold our souls. Thank you justice Roberts and company.
Apparently even the people who believe the machine will work don't believe it will work. They're saying that if it works, it might announce as its recommended course of action something that would be politically unacceptable, and its recommendation would not be followed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut if the machine works, it could predict that such a recommendation would not be followed, and it would instead recommend a course of action that is politically acceptable and would be followed.
The fear that the results of the machine would not be acted on is therefore groundless. But the critics, who began their argument with the assumption that the machine could in fact predict the future, don't accept that. They're arguing that a perfect machine would be imperfect.
It's really not a machine that will predict the future. This is just rhetorics and there is no point in engaging in funny mind games. As was already said, this project clearly attempts to improve data security and privacy on the internet. Additionally, it tries to overcome established mindsets that prevent us from acting as would be necessary, be it with financial markets or emergency management.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUm, excuse me, but this type of work has been in use for 10 years to so now, please wiki Web Bots, and research Cliff Blacks work, I have to wonder if any pre-research was done prior to writing this article???
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is interesting that a group of academicians like yourselves have never heard of plagiarism or you just do terrible background research. Try googling "web bot" and give credit where credit is due. This predictive linguistic science was discovered way before you hopped on the bandwagon. The editor of S.A. needs replaced with someone who can uphold a truth and authenticity code of ethics and the frauds who stole the already discovered technology should be exposed as "posers".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is in reply to Chandos' comment, #10. I am the author of the original article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThanks for the push back, Chandos. It is impossible in such a short article to describe a project as complex as FuturICT completely, so I appreciate the opportunity to clarify some points.
Addressing your points in order:
- Dirk Helbing told me in the interviews I had with him at the beginning of this year that 300 scientists around the world were supporting the project. If that number has tripled in the past six months, Dr. Helbing is to be congratulated, and we'll have to chalk up the difference to the slowness of atoms-based publishing.
- My description of the project (abbreviated though it was) came from interviewing Dr. Helbing, reading the material he provided, hearing him give a public presentation describing it, and interviewing supporters.
- The crystal ball comparison is the sort of short-hand headline writers use, as is the accompanying illustration of a Magic 8 Ball. The more serious question is the degree to which FuturICT is holding out the hope that it can be used to predict outcomes to hypotheses submitted by policy makers, for that is the key use that Dr. Helbing repeatedly emphasized as the justification for the project. The promise is that FuturICT will give predictions that are precise enough, reliable enough, and far-reaching enough to guide policy. That is the promise the article questions.
- Because I had limited space, I was unable to specify all the components of the FuturICT proposal, which at the time of my interviews with Dr. Helbing numbered five or six. The Living Earth Simulator was the one supported by the others, so it seemed reasonable to focus on it. Your list of three seems to leave out the Crisis Observatories,regional centers designed to notice crises and anomalies. Your Global Participatory System sounds like it includes the massively multi-player online games Dr. Helbing plans. By the way, his example was setting up a virtual 3D mall and inviting thousands of people to participate in a game in which they stand on line in order to see if unexpected architectural configurations could reduce waits; it did not strike me at the time as a well-thought-through part of the proposal.
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[continued from previous comment]
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this- Your description of the project as an open distributed system is at odds with the description Dr. Helbing gave. When I spoke with him, the data would be available to scientists who chose to join the project. Membership would be open to accredited scientists, but that is a very different idea than creating or contributing to a data commons. At the time, Dr. Helbing had not yet heard of Linked Open Data. In addition, Dr. Helbing talked about purchasing massive amounts of hardware, and thought that much of the value of FuturICT would be in developing and integrating models. It is true that he also talked about the value of multiple perspectives, but then would go back to the "flight simulator" metaphor and talk about the value of the project as enabling policy makers to get clear answers to questions.
- The article does not say that the project builds on advances in traffic modeling. It speculates that Dr. Helbing's early success in modeling traffic may have led him to think that modeling scales up without disruption from that point. The observation that to solve the particular traffic problem he was addressing would require that cars travel so close to one another that they would have to be controlled by computers came directly from Dr. Helbing.
- I have no doubt that we could productively spend a billion euros investigating how to use Big Data to better understand social behavior. I remain skeptical that the approach Dr. Helbing explained in detail to me and in public writings is the best one.
Mr. Weinberger would have done well to have given credit to the founder of predictive linguistics , Clif High. Clif and his staff have not only coined this phrase , but have been instrumental in fine tuning the model over the past 10 years. Clif 's work is not done in secret, you can see it and past reports at http://halfpasthuman.com/ I have found the work there very helpful over the past 8 years that I have been following their reports on what is around the corner. It has been helpful both in my business and personal life. The accuracy of their reports is scarily correct.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf this machine is actually built, it will make precisely one accurate prediction: that within one month an angry mob will show up with pipes and wrenches to beat it and its creators into unidentifiable pieces.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the future when the machine has perfect knowledge, future scientists won't know whether the machine controls reality or reality controls the machine.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am not impressed by "The Machine That Would Predict the Future", December 2011, and I appreciate David Weinberger's somewhat sceptical tone.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCompare this 8 billion euro plan lead by Dirk Helbing to the November 2011 article by David Freeman, "A Formula For Economic Calamity: Despite the lessons of the 2008 collapse, Wall Street is betting our future on flimsy science", very critical of the role of formulas and models.
As a visual artist, I am very aware of the role of unpredictable complexity, as a work unfolds under my hand.
Obviously, the computer could not reliably predict the future because it does not know everything. It does not know what I am thinking and what I will think up, and it can't know what all the much more influential idea-getters in the world will think up, or, when and how a very influential person may be impressed with an idea. It can't know all the factors that influence how a panicked herd will mill. It can't know that the famous weather butterfly, flapping her iridescent wings to produce a rainstorm somewhere, will momentarily distract a major investor so that one fact is not noticed and another is. The machine wouldn't even reliably predict the weather, which is a big force in human affairs. Would it be used to MANIPULATE the future, with self-fulfilling prophesies?
Good point.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe prediction of 9/11 could have been manipulative.
Perhaps, however, the prediction would not have the same impact as the actual event.
Credit where credit is due.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFutureICT Project = "Foundation" (1051) by Isaac Asimov.
All sciences are epistemologically defined as such when they find cyclical patterns in the behavior of the species they study which projected into the future, predict it. So astrology became the science of astronomy when kepler found those laws. That is how you predict the future in science, so you know when you put certain reactants you get in chemistry certain result. You dont need a machine - in this idolatric culture - to do it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI predicted the future of the economic ecosystem based in the fractal correction of the patterns of Marx and Kondratieff (cycle of overproduction of money and machines now electronic money, pcs and robots) 2 decades ago with milimetric precission - dates and details, as you can see here http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005NWE82G and in this old decade web: www.futuremagazine.net
But do we want to know the future? Of course not. As Keynes put it, we know for certain in the future we will be all dead. The censorship of my work and that of the real school of economics, which preceded it for centuries and the belief instead on the 'myths, half lies and damned statitics' of financial economists that predict nothing but make us feel happy shows we humans prefer 'memes of happiness' to truth.
This machine of course will predict nothing but it has been long ago when we thought the human mind was more powerful than a machine.
Other question is where it is leading us a culture in which the most important sciences of all - economics and history - are still in the pre-scientific age of myths (nationalisms, capitalisms) and collection of data (praxis of politics and banking)...
www.economicstruth.com
This project is like the big dig; the billion Euro reward wont touch the real cost and idea is pie in the sky. As Philip Anderson pointed out several years ago combinatorial numbers are bigger than cosmic numbers; there is no way we can make a computer large enough to include all of the variables and their differentially weighted interconnections. This is the underlying problem with the analytical approach that our models are stuck with. The weather is a possibility because it's complex with many many elements, but give it up when you start dealing with living agents that can adapt in novel ways to changes in their environments. This is the underlying theme of our book, THE BOIDS AND THE BEES: GUIDING ADAPTATION TO IMPROVE OUR HEALTH, HEALTHCARE, SCHOOLS, AND SOCIETY; we need to look at how to help living agents adapt in healthier ways rather than analyzing all of the elements we can find on how they work--none of which help us understand how they adapt.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy thought exactly. Project Foundation Prototype has begun.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOf course, a global flood explains the exact same things....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCould somebody please tell the EU what a huge financial black hole this is going to be? Especially, if you would know Helbing, you would be aware how good the guy is in making things look shiny with no scientific substance behind it at all. Besides sheer incompetence and lack of all the qualities one needs to administer such a grant combined in one person, the only hope I have for this project is that this is going to be hugely distributed indeed. If you bring enough people together some minor achievements have to come out of it. I highly doubt though, this will come from ETH. At the moment, nobody brings up these points, because everybody hopes to get a piece of the cake.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA method for using axiomatic opposites for a similar effect is described in my forthcoming book, the Dimensional Philosopher's Toolkit. By and large this is the acceptance of simple methods as a foundation for advanced insight. However, I have found little evidence that the methods have been adopted in the past. The closest resemblance is the Venn diagram, or attempts at qua exclusive sets (as opposed to absolute or modal-contextual ones) without the use of a theory of deduction.
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