Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale

The US Department of Defense is running a very-large-scale simulation of the entire world, including mathematically simulated inhabitants.

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.

"SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP)," the paper reads, so that military leaders can "develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners".

SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.

Yank a country's water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.

"The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions between multiple sides," said Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, co-author of the SWS concept paper.

As I've been saying: very big bird swarms.

Bird swarms and propaganda

These amazing videos of bird swarms displaysa jaw-dropping organicity. Despite being made of thousands of birds, they behave more like amoebas or blobs in a lava light.

You've heard me talk before about mass consciousness manipulation. I believe this bird swarm is a good visual analog of how human cultures appear to the mathematical tools of those who would try to steer our collective consciousness this or that way for their financial and political benefit.

Instead of air, though, our consciousness swarms through a volume of memetics. An n-dimensional volume of ideas and paradigms which can be measured and manipulated. It doesn't require anything like total control to be effective, it only needs to be somewhat better than chance.

With the right influences, a large bird swarm can be driven in a certain direction, or even pinched into multiple clumps. Wind, obstacles, the maneuvers of certain 'leader' birds.

So it is with societies, too. A visually shocking terrorist event can induce a certain vector in the swarm of a populace. A new fashion or culture trend can induce a new bend in the vector. A barrage of inflammatory talk radio can help separate us into more usefully homogenous clumps, making later influences even more effective. One such clump is labeled "Republican", another "Democrat". Other clumps (seen more clearly with different memetic axes) are "immigrants", "smokers", "Catholics", "vegetarians," and "senior citizens". The list is near infinite.

When the Department of Homeland Security advises people to stock up on duct tape and plastic sheets, some people will be more prone to act on such advise, based on their trust in government and susceptibility to propaganda. Their frantic purchases of such materials can be tracked from ATM and supermarket-card records in near real-time, and a meaningful model can be derived of this new 'clump' of the greater populace. Once you've identified such a clump or subswarm, you can find ways to influence it more effectively than a less polarized superclump.

Again, this process doesn't have to be perfect, or anywhere close. If you can nudge a million people in a slightly predictable vector, you can reap HUGE rewards from predicting this trend. That's how I think the cutting edge of the propaganda machinery works these days.

Swarm Behavior article on NG website

You can find National Geographic's article here. I love this kind of stuff.

"Ants aren't smart," Gordon says. "Ant colonies are." A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence.
Where this intelligence comes from raises a fundamental question in nature: How do the simple actions of individuals add up to the complex behavior of a group? How do hundreds of honeybees make a critical decision about their hive if many of them disagree? What enables a school of herring to coordinate its movements so precisely it can change direction in a flash, like a single, silvery organism? The collective abilities of such animals—none of which grasps the big picture, but each of which contributes to the group's success—seem miraculous even to the biologists who know them best. Yet during the past few decades, researchers have come up with intriguing insights.