Virtual World War

Perhaps people are taking the rise in popularity of role playing games too seriously. The US Department of Defence is developing a synthetic parallel world, complete with billions of “nodes” to represent the world population, in an attempt to foresee the effects of various events, such as how long a country can go without water or the results of televised propaganda. The concept would be to create “a synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information” according to Professor Alok Chaturvedi. It is entitled Sentient World Simulation (SWS). The simulated reaction of a population to events is based on the work of cognitive psychologists and behavioural economists, as well as predictive models based on production, marketing, finance and other fields.

The creator of SWS insists that his goal is to actually create a depersonalised likeness of each individual in the world, by using statistics from sources such as a census or market research. Others predict that the amount of personal information about people on social networking sites could also be used to create virtual populations with lifelike statistics, and that people may even volunteer information for the simulation.

Government agencies or corporations could input whatever information they want from their own databases, for their own purposes. Already in the US the Department of Homeland Defence has been using a program called Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulations (SEAS), with which they simulate crises in American cities. Another agency, the US Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), has been using SEAS to project warfare scenarios in Baghdad in 2015, and is now able to engage in real-time simulations in 62 nations, including Afghanistan and Iraq. These two nations have about 5 million “nodes” each, representing things like hospitals, mosques, pipelines and people. In most of the other countries the simulations are far less detailed, as of yet.  

Critics of the models say that computers and models will never be able to scientifically predict the true reactions of people under stress. A JFCOM spokesman admitted that using computers and code to do cultural anthropology does not feature “any hard science at this point”.