science abused   David Weinberger has his reser- vations about plausibility of 1-billion-euro computing system proposed by Dirk Helbing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH, Zurich (Scientific American, December 2011), the system that would model the entire world, simulate everything all at once, a world within the world, to predict the future. But, as I see it, Weinberger gives too much credit to the project - to model the myriad social, biological, political and physical forces at work in the world is an utterly fantastic claim to make at a time when our knowledge on complex systems advances substantially.

The main problem with Helbing’s system is Helbing himself. What am I talking about? Dirk Helbing is a physicist and the chair of sociology at ETH. He is a physicist, that’s the problem. The glory of physics as a science comes from the fact that physicists select only the problems which are soluble at a given time. To do this, they define a system which is either isolated or in well defined interactions with the environment. More impor- tantly, all happenings within a system are causal, rigidly. Then, of course, the future of the system is fully predict- able. Now, Hebling believes that by putting everything on Earth into a monster data base, the whole globe including human societies, he will have a physicists’ dream system. No way. Just look on the behavior of social systems on the internet. Why does anyone think this would work?

Weinberg puts forward, with more expectations for the same purpose, other information system - the internet, a system with the capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences. I'm sympathetic but not convinced.

 2011-11-27 

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