• • • an aural noise • • •
• • • one of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
How a Computer From MIT Predicted the End of Humanity in 1973
The software used is called “World 3 system” and it predicted that the world will come to an end provoked by humanity in 2040.
The reflection of Donella Hagaer Maedow’s face upon the screen where the programing is running in 1973.
IN ANCIENT LITERATURE, THERE IS always a mention of the end of human civilization, or as we better define it, the end of the world. The literature defines that the end of the world will be caused by some divine power just because they didn’t think that humanity would reach a point in time where they would harm this world as society does now and has done for decades.
Although other theories do suggest that whatever or whenever this “end of the world” may come, it will be man-made. The same goes for the software from 50 years ago named “World 3”, created by MIT students to originally predict how the world will look like in the future from a statistical perspective. What this first-generation artificial intelligence showed scared the world, but not enough to actually make a drastic change.
Incredible software for its time
The software was developed by a team of environmental researchers from MIT lead by Donella Hagaer Meadows who was an Environmental scientist, educator, and writer. World 3 was a development of the original software “World 1 system” created by Jay Wright Forrester known to many as the pioneer of computer engineering from MIT as well as a great system scientist.
One hypothesis of this research was to predict what the future of worldwide growth looked like based on the fact that Earth has limited resources. The researchers tried to see how soon would the world end up chewing through all of the Earth’s resources based on the statistics presented in the western world during the 1970s such as:
- World population growth
- Rate of innovation
- The growth of consumerism
- Usage of resources that don’t regenerate
- Rate of industrial production
- Rate of pollution
- Growth of agriculture
- Other less significant factors
The Club of Rome was the organization that wanted this research to happen and therefore tasked Jay Wright Forrester to create a system that can “predict the future”. The Club of Rome is a private organization formed in 1968 by high-level politicians from around the world whose interest was to predict the future in order to financially capitalize on it, although they promoted that they wanted to see “how the industry will affect the environment”. …
John Oliver explains how raids became a favorite tool of police, how few guardrails there are on their use, and what we should do about that.
THANKS to HBO and Last Week Tonight for making this program available on YouTube.
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
