Simulation fail

One billion euros is a lot of money. It's the grant being sought by FuturIcT to create a new future simulation model, sorry a "techno-socio-economic-ecological knowledge accelerator".

Global-Scale Simulation of Socio-Economic-Environmental Systems? That rings a bell.

The ambitions of this project are shockingly familiar: Fate of the World has a model we've built to simulate these systems. Unfortunately, the original proposal pdf is a painfully hilarious read. I've seen plenty of academic proposals like this and I know it's par for the course to have a goodly amount of buzz-word spamming but "Zero-Delay Reality Mining"? Techno-babble and words with ICT in them aside, the challenges to be addressed by FuturIcT are quite revealing:

1. Financial and economic crisis
2. Debts and inflation
3. Stability of the European Union
4. Corruption
5. Organized crime, hooliganism
6. Extremism, terrorism, war
7. Epidemics (SARS, H1N1 pandemic)
8. Security and cyber risks
9. Migration and integration
10. Environmental change

Hooliganism? Seriously? I know this might be a list of things that aren't well modelled (or aren't well integrated into existing models) but are you really, honestly proposing a global-scale simulation without a major inclusion of population growth, resource shortages and with a focus on hoodies and 4chan? Sorry, not 4chan (that's too 2009) Second Life. I kid you not, the future knowledge of the world rests on understanding why people feel the need to explore a slow-loading low-poly world occupied by people who are there to fill rooms with giant wangs.

It's a baffling proposal and I'd much rather have information about the real academic models that they are going to try and integrate into this. In the development of Fate of the World, we've looked at a lot of modelling as possible foundations for our game, be they Integrated Assessment Models or Agent-based modelling. We have a peer-reviewed gas-climate model for carbon concentrations and warming.

FuturIct and FotW goals should presumably be aligned, right? Isn't the point of a model like this to understand possible futures, possible outcomes, possible risks? From my non-academic viewpoint, it looks like it's both too broad and missing key details. I can imagine the ideal model I'd want to make Fate of the World with (given infinite time), but the FuturIct pitch doesn't resemble it.