By using computers to create artificial societies and business, sociologists are coming models that do some startlingly realistic things — even though it’s not always obvious why they do ahead of time.
And there are implications from this that a bunch of contrary, independent human beings, doing the same, may still end up following aggregate patterns of behavior that are both predictable in type and apparently unrelated to individual intent. Some of the lessons may be usable to chart how societies and civilizations rise … how they fall.
I don’t think I’m alone in finding this artificial genocide eerie. The outcome, of course, is chilling; but what is at least as spooky is that such complicated—to say nothing of familiar—social patterns can be produced by mindless packets of data following a few almost ridiculously simple rules. If I showed you these illustrations and told you they represented genocide, you might well assume you were seeing a schematic diagram of an actual event. Moreover, the model is designed without any element of imitation or communication, so mass hysteria or organized effort is literally impossible. No agent is knowingly copying his peers or following the crowd; none is consciously organizing a self-protective enclave. All the agents are separately and individually reacting “rationally”—according to rules, in any case—to local conditions that the agents themselves are rapidly altering.
Seriously, seriously cool stuff.
(Via SlashDot)