When will the last few generations seriously tackle global issues and opportunities?
Games and GPTs are fine, but I need verifiable tools to help me analyze and restructure UN.org and its associated sites, and all its references on the Internet. UN.org is only 6 Million entry pages, and (“united nations”) about 820 Million entry points. Not an impossible task. But ChatGPT and its siblings all use lossy methods, and make mistakes 90% of responses when asked serious questions. There are millions of these problems and opportunities, but LLMs and ChatGPT style approaches are all shallow and trivial.
Even 56 years ago taking my first graduate artificial intelligence course, the “AIs” were mostly playing games because they are finite with rigid rules. Even the “random” ones were very limited. Now the human species is 8.1 Billion people and hundreds of millions of groups, tens of thousands of global and systemic issues and global opportunities. And your whole generation is still playing games. I do not need whiz-bang devices that can make something that vaguely looks like a tool or toy in a few minutes, but solid systems capable of sustained service to billions for hundreds of years.
I started following you to see what you and your community were doing. You explore and learn quickly, and you try to share what you learn. But your world now has lots of problems and many many opportunities. Most problems are not being resolved; not at international and global scale. And most systems and methods introduced have as many or more problems then they resolve.
UN.org has much “duplication with small variations”. It does NOT need to be made into a cookie cutter toy. Rather it needs to be modeled in the full complexity of human life in a real world, so it can share what works when trying to have hundreds of millions working together – for the good of all humans and related species. So every human can live a life with dignity and purpose, meaning and understanding and hope.
If the United Nations is too new to you, you might try (“game development”) which has 72.4 Million entry points. Gather it, verify it, standardize using global tokens that work in all languages, analyze and summarize, find all the players, find all the values and purposes and applications. Put a few thousand hours of AI and human effort into it and look at it as a whole, far into the future.
Digital twins are the core of Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, Computing, Finance, Government, Issues Groups, Education, and use of knowledge on the Internet. That transition is not complete. A game board is a powerful concept, where everyone can see all the parts. If you did take the UN and cast it as a “game” or digital twin, at least all the words and data could be seen in action, not as barriers to understanding of human events, phenomena, processes and potentials in the real world.
It just occurred to me that you could singlehandedly give new meaning to ( “model UN” OR “model United Nations” ) which has about 12 Million entry points today. And that is just one of dozens of global human languages and hundreds of domain specific languages that can be used to describe things that can be modeled. Check “Tabletop exercises” and see how serious situations are handled where hundreds of millions of humans might be at risk. And the only way now is to put it into a gameboard so all the pieces can be seen in dynamic interaction and quantitative form for analysis and planning. The US Joint Chiefs uses those kinds of methods.
With so many countries now having nearly continuous armed conflicts, and more than 100 Million humans displaced from their homes, lives and countries, a decent twin of “global armed conflicts” is needed and lots of data under (“armed conflict” OR “armed conflicts”) 40.4 Million entries. From my work with Famine Early Warning, I know that when you put all the information into a system where it is all true and visible and quantified, there is a chance it can be used to change things. We can stop famine from most things, but not where armed conflicts are involved mostly. But if you model “armed conflict” with trade, groups, languages, economics, education, jobs, resources, needs – in detail – at least everyone involved can see and play the same game and hope to come to common understanding.
If you make the game modifiable by design as a way to encourage making it more real and useful, then the static Wikipedia paradigm of a few using text and images can be extended to “billions working together” and all the knowledge in immediately useful forms.
Filed as (When will the last few generations seriously tackle global issues and opportunities?)
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
