In my post The Computational Limits of the Universe and Recursive Creation, I explored the possibilities of the farthest reaches of information technology. As it happens, an outfit from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology embarked on a grandiose (if not slightly domestic) project dubbed the Living Earth Simulator. The LES represents a massive undertaking in computation, with the ultimate goal of modeling, with a generous margin for error, several simultaneous complex systems like the spread of disease, global highway traffic patterns, international financial transactions, weather patterns, telephone traffic, and more.
"Revealing the hidden laws and processes underlying societies constitutes the most pressing scientific grand challenge of our century."-Dr. Dirk Helbing, Chairman of FuturlCT (AKA the Living Earth Simulator)
Although the project may be years from producing robust and useful data, Dr. Helbing and his team have acquired funding to construct a supercomputer array that will accept real-time complex data input from financial markets, medical records, Planetary Skin, social networks, news agencies, and the USGS, and analyze and predict the emerging and organic trends generated by the complex matrix of global Human society. Helbing hopes the project will act as a 'information collider' drawing upon the exponential pool of data our information technology generates, and searching for significant patterns in seemingly distinct systems.
Only the technological constraints of the year 2011 prevent the Living Earth Simulator from modeling exclusively the large scale effects of Human Behavior on the environment. As our technological capacities progress, projects like the LES will begin to model the more subtle and complex motivations that generate patterns of commerce and communication by modeling the interconnected behaviors of individual humans. Eventually such simulations will involve the creation of sentient beings, Homo Amplio, who have authentic and emotional human experiences as part of the simulacrum.
Modeling the planet earth may be a far cry from modeling all possible particle histories in the observable universe, but creating accurate models of earth must eventually include creating accurate models of the sentient beings living on it. Perhaps these Homo Amplio, created in a statistical research simulation, would be 'alive' for hours or days on this Earth, but because binary computing will be able to vastly outpace the electro-chemical machine of the brain in terms of operations per second, the created Homo Amplio might experience full authentic and human lives, perceiving their subjective flow of time precisely as we do ours. The ethical implications of creating Human lives for the purposes of a science project however, represents an issue Homo Sapiens will have to consider carefully as projects like the LES proliferate, and the hardware required to replicate or surpass(in terms of information and accuracy) the LES becomes more accessible.
It is conceivable that a garage in 2111 will be capable of holding a computer capable of simulating billions of Homo Sapiens-like Human lives at the whims any Human with the resources and interest to do such a thing. Yikes!
No comments:
Post a Comment