“Scaling up” appears to be the key phrase in this article. The volume of data that we are amassing has gotten to the scale that we need infrastructure that streamlines massive processes and transfers of data between different fields. The tone of the article is extremely enthusiastic, and certainly the possibilities are compelling. Massive-scale agent-based-modeling may get to the point where each of us has our “own” agent that is intimately programmed to us. Disease control is a situation where this kind of thing could be very practical. However, this article offers no insight on the ethical level and I think this is a serious omission. It is troubling that it is now possible to perform sophisticated analyses on tens of millions of tweets on Twitter in a few seconds. The application for emergency response is no doubt useful, but powerful forces in our society seem to be gaining more ability to sort through all the noise of everyone’s data, and I think this should be discussed at least briefly. Perhaps such a discussion would make the NSF less eager to grant millions of dollars to the author’s institution, as they have been doing. On a different note, I like the idea of these infrastructures as an eco-system, as they are called in the paper. Perhaps the organisms that inhabit this ecosystem will be the agents that are intimately programmed to us, so that we’ll all have holograms in a parallel universe. It reminds me a bit of Ray Kurzweil’s idea of singularity, where we all upload our consciousness onto the cloud. The technology described in the article is still a long way from that, of course.
-Yojo