You, on the other hand, looked like a French peasant. But clean, as far as that goes.
This article in The Register astounded me. Apparently, the US military is working towards a massive simulation of the entire planet:
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....This whole project reminds me of the Stanislaw Lem story "Non Serviam," in which simulated beings begin to debate their proper relationship to their creator. Lem, if you haven't read anything by him, is one of the best science-fiction writers of the twentieth century. His short stories are akin to Borges', with more investment in probable futures as a means of interrogating philosophical problems.
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....
Of course, government agencies and corporations can add to SWS whatever personally-identifiable information they choose from their own databases, and for their own purposes.
Someone will do (has already done?) a great dissertation that figures out why authors like Asimov, Lem, and even William Gibson have so often been right about the future. Are the developments they describe implicit in the structure of society and existing technologies? Or does the fact that young nerds read them make them sulf-fulfilling?
