Key Points
I got pulled over by the [Israeli] military, by a guy holding [a military rifle] because we had a Palestinian taxi driver who drove past a line he wasn't supposed to, Shults tells WIRED..
The model will ultimately create a virtual version of each and every one of the 15 million people who live in Israel and the Palestinian territories, each imbued with demographics, religious beliefs, and moral values that echo their real-world counterparts, according to Shults and Lane...
We set out to try and come up with something that could help us better understand what it is about human nature that sometimes results in conflict, and then how can we use that tool to try and get a better handle or understanding on these deeper, more psychological issues at really large scales, Lane says.. The result of their work was a study published in 2018 in The Journal for Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, which found that people are typically peaceful but will engage in violence when an outside group threatens the core principles of their religious identity...
And if the data doesnt exist, we'll go out and we'll do our own experimentation with universities to see if there is evidence, and then we will build that into our project, Lane says.. In recent years, Lane and Shults have worked with a number of groups and governments to apply their model to better understand situations across the globe, including the conflicts in South Sudan and the Balkans..
We spent a whole week extracting from the UN officials we met information that's relevant, that we need to know for the model, getting a sense of their understanding of the dynamics, the data that they might have that could inform the model's calibration and final validation, Shults says.. Shults would not discuss the detailed parameters the UN had specified be built into the model, but his team gives the UN team regular updates over Zoom on the construction of the model and the simulation experiments that are being run to test out the conditions and mechanisms that might lead to outcomes that they desire, he says.. The UNDP has not yet responded to WIREDs request for comment...
