Skilluminati Research

New World Economics: Simulations Controlling Reality in 2007

Posted Sep 18, 2007 221 comments

Dick Cheney has a large penis Hey there, welcome to the future. Here's a quick tour:

As of December 2006, the richest 2% of Earth humans owned more than half of the planet's wealth. I suspect the numbers on that are a bit slippery, but the fact it's anywhere close to that level of inequality is still disturbing. The feedback OODA loop of John Boyd has created a strange situation that humans have never faced before. When you can capture data on huge complex systems -- like economies, crowds, nations, weather systems -- and use that data to guide future decisions, that's fairly normal government. What's unprecedented is the speed of the feedback loop, when technocrats can accurately assess the results of their actions, in real time.

This is not particularly science fiction. I've disussed aspects of the surveillance state before, but I am far from an expert and the field is vast and mostly secretive. I would point you towarads recent articles at Global Research and Cryptogon for more knowledgeable takes on the surveillance enclosure. The peeks we do get are signifigant, such as the Sentient World Simulator that DARPA and Simulex have been working on, which is a fully-functional model of planet Earth, all it's nations, and their people. The system is based off an earlier technology called Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation (SEAS), which markets this super-computer power to the corporate world:

Instead of experimenting with real people, SEAS allows clients to interact with synthetic people and observe what is happenin Using agent-based modeling in a business war-gaming environment, SEAS seamlessly incorporates all aspects of managerial decision making to provide a complete and integrated view of economies, industries, and organizations.

As Bill Joy said in his classic essay Why the Future Doesn't Need Us, "knowledge has become a weapon we wield against ourselves." A Sentient World Simulator needs data, of course, and it needs algorithms to shape that data into a virtual world. It's not difficult to get a sense of the structure: just check the existing literature and you'll find dozens of headlines in the field of computer simulation. For instance, the recent chemical testing innovation that lets researchers "drug test entire cities at once" -- that would be helpful. The mind also turns to models of crowd behavior, simulating economic "shocks and stress tests," and the visually compelling model of the "Product Space":

CLICK TO ENGLARGE

The researchers used trade data where all exports are coded within 775 product classes obtained from a National Bureau of Economic Research project. The structure of the product space is such that more sophisticated products (such as metal, machinery, and chemicals) formed the core, and had connections to many other products. A variety of other products (such as fishing, agriculture, textiles, electronics, and mining) comprised different clusters in the periphery of the product space.

The product space can be used to visualize the patterns defined by the exports of a particular country. As a rule of thumb, poor countries tend to occupy the periphery of the space while rich countries are preferentially located at the core of it. Since countries can move through the product space by developing goods similar to those they already produce, poorer countries have a more difficult time extending their product variety. But, in simplified terms, it�s easy for the rich to get richer.

It's been remarkable how much the facade of normal life has dropped away in the past five years. The Class War is being waged very openly these days. This year, scientists claimed that on average, throughout time and among nations, it's normal for the majority to live in poverty. Not only that, it tended to follow mathematical laws -- which is a curious kind of finding. Is this a justification for wealthy elites, or a diagnosis of a serious problem?

Economists who yearn for the redistribution of wealth in an ideal society are up against history. According to a recent study, the uneven distribution of wealth in a society appears to be a universal law that holds true for economies in many different societies, from ancient Egypt to modern Japan and the U.S. This distribution may reflect a simple natural law analogous to a 100-year-old theory describing the distribution of energy in a gas.

The results show that the poorer majority of the population follows one distribution, while a small proportion of the wealthiest people veers off in a tail following a power-law distribution, in essence reflecting how �the rich get richer.�

Isomorphism

Bacteria Network Intelligence Economics

Catherine Austin Fitts calls the western world's free market the "tapeworm economy," and her essays on the structure and nature of that tapeworm are very much worth reading. Also consider the metaphor at face value -- there are many isomorphisms between social and bacteria phenomena. Take this recent PhysOrg article about "social parasites" on the bacterial level:

Cooperation is widespread in the natural world but so too are cheats � mutants that do not contribute to the collective good but simply reap the benefits of others� cooperative efforts. In evolutionary terms, cheats should indeed prosper, so how cooperation persists despite the threat of cheat takeover is a fundamental question. Recently, biologists at the Universities of Edinburgh and Oxford have found that in bacteria, cheats actually orchestrate their own downfall.

�Cheats are kept in check by simple frequency dependence,� says Adin Ross-Gillespie, lead author of the study. �When rare, cheats prosper at the expense of cooperators, but as they become more common, the profitability of their strategy declines. At equilibrium, neither strategy has the upper hand, so the two coexist.�

But, the authors note, this pattern arises only under certain conditions. In this case, it arose because population productivity, too, was sensitive to the frequency of cheats. Cultures with few cheats grew rapidly and achieved larger absolute sizes in the time available, providing greater opportunity for cheats to exploit the situation. Meanwhile, cultures comprising high proportions of cheats grew poorly. �Too many cheats spoil the broth,� quips Ross-Gillespie.

Also check out Brainsturbator for futher meditation on bacterial networks and intelligence, if this concept grabs you.

Hopefully you're beginning to get a sense of the simulation culture. The fundamental assumptions are that human actions can be predicted, that humans are homogenous enough to model with relatively simple "agents," and that mass behavior is more important -- and more "real" -- than our individual passions and thoughts. The only question I want to bring up today: what if the assumptions are all wrong? As our simulations become more and more complex and powerful, and the results of these simulations come to be taken more seriously by government officials and given weight when making decisions, what if it's all numbers on a computer with minimal connection to reality? Is it signifigant that the people building these simulations take economic inequality and human poverty as a "given"?

No Consolation Prize For You

Perhaps one reason that Skilluminati Research gets less updates than my other sites is the subject matter itself. Given the choice on any given day between analyzing the structure of the prison planet or exploring anything else on Earth, I will often skip over Skilluminati Research. Having given you a quick tour of the future we're living in, I feel like I should say something, offer some hope, give some closure...instead of just dropping off you exactly where you were a few minutes ago, only perhaps a bit more depressed. However, the cold facts of the Kali Yuga are this: there is no solution on the horizon and in all probability, this is a fight we will not win. In fact, it was lost before most people reading this were even born.

The question is, what do we do next? This is the reality, this is the playing field -- let's invent some new games.