I honestly don't know what to make of this. There are intelligent people involved in it; I've attended talks by some of them. Its not as crazy as the sensation

I honestly don't know what to make of this. There are intelligent people involved in it; I've attended talks by some of them. Its not as crazy as the sensationalist article headline makes it out to be; one excerpt from the "Project Outline" from http://www.futurict.eu/ http://www.futurict.eu/ shows this: "Most importantly, the FuturICT project will NOT attempt to collect “all the data in the world”, or to represent each individual on the globe by an identical copy in some giant multi-agent simulation, considering private features and preferences of all individuals. Science is the art of abstraction and approximation. Just as maps do not show all the features of our environment, a scientific model is specified such that a particular question can be addressed in the simplest possible way. That is, models are to be problem-specific, and parameters and variables not expected to be relevant for the answer should be neglected." I don't know much about the details of the specific project; but I think a large degree of scepticism is healthy, when discussing any proposal to build models with very large scope. People have put a lot of effort into making economic models, but we still aren't much good at predicting the kinds of phenomena that we are interested in, such as the occurrence of crashes. It can be easy to model large scale social phenomena; but modelling them usefully is very hard. It sounds very ambitious; but then there are lots of smart people involved; I don't know.