humans of simulated new york

Francis Tseng (@frnsys) & Fei Liu (@binaricorn)

a participative & speculative economic simulation based on New York Census data

breathe life into data?

data about human phenomenon:

experiences → numbers

can we do the reverse?

experiences ← numbers

what "experience generators" already exist?

Cities: Skylines (Paradox Interactive)

Stellaris (Paradox Interactive)

to generate experiences from data, we can define a system (an agent-based model), parameterize it with the data, and let it run.

then pluck out individuals and get their life story.

designing a system

system dynamics + modeling complex systems

from GIS and Agent-Based Modeling: Part 1, Andrew Crooks

development process

original idea: user-specified characters

instead, "veil of ignorance"

Imagine that you have set for yourself the task of developing a totally new social contract for today's society. How could you do so fairly? ...imagine yourself...behind a veil of ignorance....you know nothing of yourself and your natural abilities, or your position in society. You know nothing of your sex, race, nationality, or individual tastes.

The Veil of Ignorance (Ernest Svenson, originally from John Rawls)

so each player is randomly assigned a person

but we didn't want to use real people

"plausible" simulant generation process:

gathered individual-level American Community Survey data from IPUMS USA

trained a Bayes network on the data

sample from the Bayes net

>>> from people import generate
>>> year = 2005
>>> generate(year)
{
    'age': 36,
    'education': <Education.grade_12: 6>,
    'employed': <Employed.non_labor: 3>,
    'wage_income': 3236,
    'wage_income_bracket': '(1000, 5000]',
    'industry': 'Independent artists, performing arts, spectator sports, and related industries',
    'industry_code': 8560,
    'neighborhood': 'Greenwich Village',
    'occupation': 'Designer',
    'occupation_code': 2630,
    'puma': 3810,
    'race': <Race.white: 1>,
    'rent': 1155.6864868468731,
    'sex': <Sex.female: 2>,
    'year': 2005
}

started with super-detailed agents

each individual had their own set of values (utility functions)
agents set their own goals (e.g. get a job, earn enough to visit the doctor)
each morning, agents planned their day and tried to finish that plan

The Soul of the Sims (1997, Will Wright)

The Soul of the Sims (1997, Will Wright)

but, for faster simulations, went with simpler simulants:

agents have basic personality traits:
- altruistic vs selfish 👿
- frugal vs lavish 👑
if they don't have a job, they will try to get one 💼
if they have enough money, they start a business 📈
- if they go bankrupt, back to the labor force with them 📉
if they get sick, they won't go to a doctor until:
- they get intolerably sick (varies across individuals) 🌡
- can afford it 💸
buy food to survive 🍔
- they can starve to death 💀
- buy as much as they want to or can 🛍

we also incorporated social elements:

simulants become friends with other simulants based on the model in Social Distance in the United States: Sex, Race, Religion, Age, and Education Homophily among Confidants, 1985 to 2004 (Jeffrey A. Smith, Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, 2014)

disease and employment spread through these networks

intelligent agents

businesses are Q-learning reinforcement agents that learn how to set price (profit margins) and production quantity based on market signals
- try to maximize profit, natch
government is also a Q-learning agent that sets taxes and welfare
- tries to maximize mean quality of life

<http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eladlieb/RLRG.html> — http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eladlieb/RLRG.html

structural inequalities

likelihood of someone getting hired/fired based on real labor statistics
starting wealth also based on data

other idea (for future versions):

patterns of interactions from players influence the world:

how you play influences other simulants (e.g. via social contagion models)
those simulants stick around for future players. ie, if you're a greedy asshole, other simulants become greedy assholes

patterns of interactions from players creating emergent narratives:

you played this game like 5 other players who we've noted as lacking in empathy
do the conditions of their play reveal more about society and norms?

speculating worlds

most parameters can be tweaked to setup hypothetical worlds, e.g.:

labor required to produce food
nutritional value of food
productivity boost of equipment

example: monoculture crop blight

"normal" productivity per equipment
labor required to produce food at high levels
nutritional value of food at low levels

example: massive solar flare

low productivity per equipment
labor required to produce food at high levels
nutritional value of food at low levels

example: fully-automated luxury communism

extremely high productivity per equipment
labor required to produce food at "normal" levels
nutritional value of food at "normal" or high levels

the visualization

used Flatland's hierarchy of shapes (polygon count correlated with economic status)
people are color-coded according to Census-coded race
building layers are color-coded according to the businesses that occupy them (one layer per business)

what's the point of simulation?

a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole

Postmodernism (Frederic Jameson)

an inability to cognitively map the gears and contours of the world system is as debilitating for political action as being unable mentally to map a city would prove for a city dweller.

Cartographies of the Absolute (Alberto Toscano & Jeff Kinkle)

So this is one thing that can help out in the current conjuncture: economic models which adopt the programme of epistemic accelerationism, which reduce the complexity of the world into aesthetic representations, which offer pragmatic purchase on manipulating the world, and which are all oriented toward the political accelerationist goals of building and expanding rational freedom. These can provide both navigational tools for the current world, and representational tools for a future world.

Accelerationism - Epistemic, Economic, Political (Nick Srnicek, emphasis mine)

An Atlas of Agendas (Bureau d´Études)

can this be presented in a less nauseating way?

understand the world as it is now
envision how it could be in the future
perceive it from a perspective and logic other than your own

Neocolonialism: Ruin Everything (Subaltern Games)

Democracy 3 (Positech Games)

The Founder: A Dystopian Business Simulator (Francis Tseng)

The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)

The Hainish Cycle

(and other social science fiction)

exploring alternative economic, social, & political models, e.g.

basic income & post-work society
cybernetic-planned economies (a la Iain M. Bank's Culture)
horizontal/non-hierarchical organizations
liquid democracy

an engine for postcapitalist accelerationist projects

connect the local to the global
empower people to confront complexity, instead of become victim to it
strategic tool for scaling action across the global network

in the long term...

public policy modeling and computational governance

...whether we focus our lens on the forests or students of Brazil or the world writ large, we cannot help but see the inherent complexity. We see diverse, purposeful connecting people constructing lives, interacting with institutions, and responding to rules, constraints, and incentives created by policies....complex systems are difficult to describe, explain, and predict, so we cannot expect ideal policies. But we can hope to improve, to do better. (p. 14)

Modeling Complex Systems for Public Policies (Bernardo Alves Furtado, Patrícia A. M. Sakowski e Marina H. Tóvolli, emphasis mine)

how we deal with problems now

how we deal with problems now

from ODPHP Overview of System Dynamics (Milstein, v5 as delivered).pdf

"Cyberlearning" is a hypothetical educational method using AI and simulation to encourage systems thinking:

[Cyberlearning] is critical to addressing these global, seemingly intractable, challenges. Cyberlearning provides us...the capacity to experience this information’s implications in diverse and visceral ways.

Optimists' Creed: Brave New Cyberlearning, Evolving Utopias (Circa 2041) (Winslow Burleson & Armanda Lewis)

simulation, logistics, and the reconfiguration thesis

Cybersyn (via Vanity Fair)

development struggles:

no advanced computers (IBM pulled out of Chile for fear of nationalization)
interrupted by US-backed coup installing dictator Pinochet

the reconfiguration thesis

are wal-mart and amazon the legacy of cybersyn?

the reconfiguration thesis: can we use existing corporate technology (e.g. logistics/planning/simulation) for emancipatory purposes?

Could the speed, standardization and automation of the container port, or the capacities of Walmart distribution chains, be regarded as possible material bases for alternative, antagonistic organizations of production, circulation and distribution?

Lineaments of the Logistical State (Alberto Toscano)

Briefly, nothing and nobody in the Culture is exploited. It is essentially an automated civilisation in its manufacturing processes, with human labour restricted to something indistinguishable from play, or a hobby.

A Few Notes on the Culture (Iain M. Banks)

future work

current state of HOSNY:

very simple simulation
small-scale
non-generalized/inflexible code

build out a tool set to make developing agent-based simulations easier

create works where the subject is not an artifact or an individual but the system itself

current state of simulation tools:

proprietary
expensive
technically-oriented
non-narrative

TRUE - Temporal Reasoning Universal Elaboration

make these simulations easy to build and apply to many different domains:

economic & public policy simulation
urban planning
generative art
emergent narrative
video games
...

agents, agents in the simulation, who is the funniest one of all?

simulation of a comedian population that only makes knock-knock jokes
genetic algorithm to selectively mate the funnier of these agents
creating the funniest agent from this process

open-source simulation

shareable, transparent simulation models are critical:

To succeed even within the game’s fairly broad definition of success (building a habitable city), you must enact certain government policies. An increase in the number of police stations, for instance, always correlates to a decrease in criminal activity; the game’s code directly relates crime to land value, population density, and police stations. Adding police stations isn’t optional, it’s the law.

Les Simerables (Ava Kofman, writing about SimCity)

(there is no view from nowhere)

more speculative fiction

develop the "political imaginary"

tlön

why?

encouraging systems thinking and social consciousness:

There’s another way to think about games....What if the real fight against monocultural bias and blinkeredness...[involves] the abdication of our own selfish, individual desires in the interest of participating in systems larger than ourselves? What if the thing games most have to show us is the higher-order domains to which we might belong, including families, neighborhoods, cities, nations, social systems, and even formal structures and patterns?

Video Games Are Better Without Characters (Ian Bogost)

"another world is possible"