Leaked Pentagon video is a science fiction story about the future of cities

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/bizarre-leaked-pentagon-video-is-a-science-fiction-story-about-the-future-of-cities/?comments=1

by lebek • 10 years ago

39 4 10 years ago

arstechnica.com

snippet22• 10 years ago

I feel like the video really really was based on faith that the future will just become more complex. This is prolly the number one reason why man doesn't progress as much as it should. It just presumes so much and yet so very little. It's like the whole AI taking over theory. Really really doesn't go well with people because it lacks complete and utter detail.

dualogy• 10 years ago

I feel like the video really really was based on faith that the future will just become more complex.

Well as long as we keep churning out more coders and more code, it will! Automatically. Just by definition.

We're buffering some of that explosion & redirecting a lot of that complexity potential by evolving a relatively harmless "JS frameworks all the way down" song-and-dance. Turns out we don't need Basic Income, we can just have unlimited middlemen ("the service economy") multiply a single GDP-growing transaction into infinite GDP-growing transactions, and have infinite "creatives" each add their own unique superfluous additions of bits & bytes to infinite new numbers of "products & services". Who cares about "economical", prudent, frugal, there's too many pensions to save and nothing else can as credibly inflate into infinity as the digital "industries". Crikey, I'm railing off track here.

Ever more complexity, thus ever more fragility, ever more reproduction. Has been the name of the game since the coal age. Would have to happen this way with any brainy species ending up at the top of the foodchain sooner or later. Once you eat up your prey animals and go "civilized", the direction is irreversably set. But hey, Elon is gonna blow us into space so the future is as bright as the night sky :D

jk4930• 10 years ago

It's certainly based on empirical data, projections, and some model assumptions.

Urbanization: its drivers (jobs or other opportunities) and consequences (growth faster than the infrastructure or social structure can catch up), the demographic composition (a youth bulge with terrible consequences), the potential conflicts between ethnic and ideological groups etc., all that is known from what we observed so far and can be projected 15 years into the future.

Increasing complexity is a concern. But scale is the real killer. Who has the corresponding means to manage such numbers? They mentioned 100,000 of (potentially) revolting inhabitants in a city of 10 million (1%) as an example. How do you control them? Complexity means things become more opaque and surprising, uprisings have more hidden resources and connections, the criminal and other networks are harder to detect and contain.

Anyone interested in this challenge?

bbctol• 10 years ago

Reminds me of that time the head writer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was hired by a think tank, because he'd spent so much time imagining what the future of warfare could be. http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/news/press-releases/call-of-d...

Leaked Pentagon video is a science fiction story about the future of cities

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