Please ignore the clickbaity idiotic headline. This is either a passing fad or the next big thing to worry about. My guess is that this particular implementation is just a primitive beginning of something more sophisticated - and yes, some of their findings are at the level of the bleedin' obvious. Gotta start somewhere. Under my working hypothesis that populations are easier to model than individuals, I'd be inclined to worry.
An international team of computer scientists, philosophers, religion scholars, and others are collaborating to build computer models that they populate with thousands of virtual people, or “agents.” As the agents interact with each other and with shifting conditions in their artificial environment, their attributes and beliefs—levels of economic security, of education, of religiosity, and so on—can change. At the outset, the researchers program the agents to mimic the attributes and beliefs of a real country’s population using survey data from that country. They also “train” the model on a set of empirically validated social-science rules about how humans tend to interact under various pressures.
And then they experiment: Add in 50,000 newcomers, say, and invest heavily in education. How does the artificial society change? The model tells you. Don’t like it? Just hit that reset button and try a different policy.
The goal of the project is to give politicians an empirical tool that will help them assess competing policy options so they can choose the most effective one. It’s a noble idea: If leaders can use artificial intelligence to predict which policy will produce the best outcome, maybe we’ll end up with a healthier and happier world. But it’s also a dangerous idea: What’s “best” is in the eye of the beholder, after all.
Suppose the tool becomes widely used. Then things get meta : you have to model a population with access to the population-modelling tool...
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/07/artificial-intelligence-religion-atheism/565076/
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