"Knowing the enemy, one avatar at a time; As military crafts virtual Afghan villages, some scientists raise ethical concerns" by Farah Stockman, Globe Staff | May 30, 2010
WASHINGTON — It’s a familiar scene in Afghanistan: Donkey carts and hawkers fill the market square. Bearded men in traditional garb drink tea and search for work. A US visitor scans their faces, trying to distinguish friend from foe.
But this village is virtual. The villagers are bits of software code, and the Americans who “visit’’ are players in a videogame-like program designed not only for training purposes but for intelligence analysis.
The program, which loosely resembles the game SimCity, is part of a US government effort to develop sophisticated computer models of real Afghan villages — complete with virtual people based on actual inhabitants — in an attempt to predict their reaction to US raids and humanitarian aid.
The project, spearheaded by a University of Pennsylvania engineer at the behest of an undisclosed US government agency, straddles the line between research and intelligence as part of a wider US effort to design software capable of forecasting human behavior in war zones.
This type of research, often referred to as “human terrain mapping,’’ has attracted increased funding in recent years from US military planners who believe it will become a crucial tool for combating terrorism and insurgencies.
Yup, going to make the whole world one big control grid on the computer.
If successful, supporters say, it could save lives by helping the US government anticipate — and address — violent conflicts before they erupt.
Maybe NOT INVADING PEOPLE over LIES would help?
Readers, I apologize; however, I AM SO SICK of this MSM SHIT being shoveled as NEWS!
Also see: The Downfall of a Once Great Reporter
Maybe they never were one and I just thought they were when I was still a naive idiot.
“War is the worst-case scenario,’’ said Barry Silverman, who has received more than $500,000 in federal funding to build a virtual Afghan village. “The goal is to resolve things long before that.’’
Depends on who you are, Barry.
See where and to which interest the tax money always goes, Americans?
Silverman is one of a handful of modelers who attempt to reproduce human belief systems in the virtual world.
“I think the goal in the long run would be to just crank out village after village,’’ he said.
Like I said, the global control grid.
They already have you in the camera's eye, Americans -- and you paid for that, too.
It is not his first attempt to model real people. In the past decade, a US agency has paid him to model the Palestinian intifada, Al Qaeda figures, leaders in the Middle East, and 27 Iraqi political figures. In 2008, he was asked to make detailed guesses about events in Bangladesh, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, based on his models. The US agency measured his forecasts against real events, and they turned out to be more than 80 percent accurate, he said.
But....
The US military has built computer models of the real world for decades. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Pentagon developed flight simulators to train pilots, and war games to teach soldiers to counter virtual missiles. By the 1990s, the Pentagon began populating simulators with increasingly realistic virtual people....
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the US military and intelligence agencies turned to this technology not only for training, but to help understand — and even predict — the behavior of real people overseas....
Why not TALK to THEM instead?
Computer models are an improvement on old-fashioned informants and spies because they are designed to catch connections that human analysts might miss. Models help policy-makers tackle a host of complex problems, from electricity grid expansions to snarled traffic.
Navy Captain Dylan Schmorrow, who works in the Human Social Culture Behavior Modeling program in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, a program launched in 2008 to improve the science behind the models, said he was hopeful that they would one day be as sophisticated as forecasts of the weather and economic activity....
Yeah, and we KNOW HOW ACCURATE THOSE ARE!!!
Sigh!
Schmorrow added that the military’s interest has increased exponentially in recent years, although the programs are impossible to track since many are classified. His own budget has more than doubled to $25 million to support some 50 separate research projects, while the budget for human terrain teams has grown from $20 million in 2005 to nearly $100 million this year.
The funding has flowed to a wide range of projects. Iris Bohnet, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, received funding to study how trust is built in the Middle East....
By NOT TELLING THEM LIES and KILLING MILLIONS in the INVASIONS BASED ON SUCH?
By TELLING ISRAEL to STUFF IT?
Are you REALLY WASTING WAR MONEY on that, Americans?
Yeah, the WARS are only like a VIDEO GAME, kids.
Those are NOT REAL PEOPLE DYING!
Just reset!
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