Get ready for the supercomputer that can predict the future (even the next recession) as EU prepares £900m funding.
'Many problems we have today - including social and economic instabilities, wars, disease spreading - are related to human behaviour, but there is apparently a serious lack of understanding regarding how society and the economy work.
Professor Helbing said the LES would be able to predict the spread of infectious disease such as Swine Flu, identify methods for tackling climate change and even spot an impending financial crisis.
Get ready for the supercomputer that can predict the future as EU prepares £900m funding
As with a crumbling sand pile, it would be foolish to attribute the collapse of a fragile bridge to the last truck that crossed it, and even more foolish to try to predict in advance which truck might bring it down. The system is responsible, not the components. But after the financial crisis of 2007-8, many people thought that predicting the subprime meltdown would have helped. It would not have, since it was a symptom of the crisis, not its underlying cause.
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Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.
http://jamesshinn.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/The-Black-Swan-of-Cairo.pdf