MGCR 331 - SWS

The Sentient World Simulation (SWS) is described as a “synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information”. While this definition sounds complex and confusing, the simulation is really just an imitation of our planet with the ability to adapt to common situations. This simulation is being developed by a company called Simulex and one of the biggest customers is the US Department of Defense. It will be used to predict various outcomes in our world. According to Purdue University professor Alok Chaturvedi, one of the co-authors of a paper on the SWS from Purdue University, “The idea is to generate alternative futures with outcomes based on interactions between multiple sides”. The systems runs a broad range of tests to determine outcomes of real-life, real-time scenarios, such as our physiological and emotional reactions. According to another blogger, the simulation system can test situations such as how long one might be able to go without food, or how one might react to televised propaganda. The “real-life” people and scenarios in the simulation are created by billions of nodes.
This emerging technology has many advantages. The military is using it to analyze behaviors of both their enemies and allies, in order to determine courses of actions and methods of how to deal with certain situations when they arise. For those who saw the movie “Shooter”, Mark Wahlberg’s character was hired to determine the best possible locations and conditions under which a sniper might make an assassination attempt. The SWS would be able to help determine these specifics, saving lots of time and money. Military uses aside, the SWS can also be used to observe the outcomes and impacts of natural disasters like tornados and earthquakes, and crises like droughts and forest fires. Since the SWS can also simulate all of the aspects of our daily lives, including small boutiques, larger institutions and everyday conflicts, it can be used to predict how individuals and groups will react to certain stressors and events.
As with most simulation and GPS technologies, this high-tech simulation system comes with a high price. Not only financially speaking but in order for people to be “copied” and represented by nodes in this system, they must give up a lot of their privacy. In order for the simulator to predict each and every possible outcome and to anticipate the impacts on our lives, it needs to be fed with constant data and where other than to collect this data than from the people themselves. Since the SWS can even simulate and imitate our emotional and psychological reactions, many people are less than thrilled with the idea of the US government and military studying them in a virtual simulation. Another downside to this simulator is the fact that in time, it will probably be able to remove all aspects of predictability from our lives. Why bother spending time dating, making business decisions, and even studying if we can simply predict the future outcomes and determine whether or not they have a big impact or are in our favor? While emerging technologies will make our lives easier, we must really consider whether we want our society run by robots and machines, and if it is right to play “God” by predicting the future.

Baard, Mark. “Sentient World: War Games on the Grandest Scale”. The Register, Jun.23, 2007.
<http://www.theregister.com/2007/06/23/sentient_worlds/page3.html>
Chaturvedi, Alok. “Computational Challenges for a Sentient World Simluation”. Purdue University, Mar.10, 2006.
<http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:_Ys4fmPfVhUJ:www.purdue.edu/acsl/abstract/march10_06.html+Sentient+World+Simulation&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=ca>
“Military Running a Parallel Earth Simluator”. Slashdot, Jun.29, 2007.
<http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/30/0018211>
Wikipedia. “Synthetic Environment for Analysis and Simulation”. 2007.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Environment_for_Analysis_and_Simulations>