This is my research. It’s an ongoing project that I will be discussing as part of my PhD dissertation, which I plan to defend in a few months. I had hoped to finish my PhD before this project got attention, but the website is already live and I can’t really complain. In fact, I’m really happy with the interest and I want to engage.
Here’s a few important facts about pplapi:
the agents are synthetic, not real people
the numbers are based on population parameters, so in aggregate, pplapi approaches reality
at the individual level, these agents exist in the “uncanny valley” of kindof-sortof-implausible demographics
some dimensions have more noise (error) than others; income is the easiest example
the research is ongoing, so there many opportunities to improve
one way to “use” pplapi is with an agent-based modelling environment, like NetLogo or MASON
This work is not merely a technical demonstration; it serves as a proof-of-concept “simulacrum” of humanity, which is axiomatic in my dissertation. I believe this work also raises a host of moral and ethical questions that were previously abstract but are now easier to comprehend. I do not believe pplapi itself has crossed any ethical boundaries, but I think the line of questioning is now clearer.
“pplapi (pronounced “people API”) is a virtual database of the entire living human population. The current database contains 7,171,922,938 agents and is approximately 6.8 TB in size. ”
“Currently, Agent Space contains a simulated entry for each of the ~7 billion humans alive in 2014, who are all addressable with pplapi.”
It would be interesting to see if you could get a subset of your agents to set up a group here, and see if you can devise a way to make them influence the model
“UNU unleashes the brainpower of groups, combining their knowledge, opinions, and instincts into a Swarm Intelligence that is often smarter and more insightful than the individuals would be alone.”
Age: 0 (unborn) Language: Persian Religion: Muslim Income: $7909 USD Openness [i]: above average Conscientiousness [i]: average Extraversion [i]: below average Agreeableness [i]: barely above average Neuroticism [i]: average
How exactly did they determine language, religion, income, and neuroticism of a person who wasn’t even born yet?
Personality characteristics are partially heritable (i.e. a small amount of variance in these dimensions is attributable to genetics) and the global distribution is not uniform. pplapi implements a simplistic model of this general system, but the point is that many of these demographic and psychometric dimensions—including language and religion—are indicated prior to birth. While there will always be exceptions, pplapi models the typical case.
From the agent you selected, income is obviously implausible but all the other dimensions are probably in the ballpark. If you went to Iran (the country of that agent), then odds are, you can find a real person with those characteristics (excepting income, of course). Even better, if you sampled from Iran on pplapi and if you sampled real people in Iran, then odds are the distributions will be similar.
I know several ways to violate the assumptions of pplapi in order to generate garbage analyses, so there’s a lot of nuance here. However, I also know several interesting questions that can be answered with pplapi, so I think pplapi is nevertheless an interesting contribution.
This is my research. It’s an ongoing project that I will be discussing as part of my PhD dissertation, which I plan to defend in a few months. I had hoped to finish my PhD before this project got attention, but the website is already live and I can’t really complain. In fact, I’m really happy with the interest and I want to engage.
Here’s a few important facts about pplapi:
the agents are synthetic, not real people
the numbers are based on population parameters, so in aggregate, pplapi approaches reality
at the individual level, these agents exist in the “uncanny valley” of kindof-sortof-implausible demographics
some dimensions have more noise (error) than others; income is the easiest example
the research is ongoing, so there many opportunities to improve
one way to “use” pplapi is with an agent-based modelling environment, like NetLogo or MASON
This work is not merely a technical demonstration; it serves as a proof-of-concept “simulacrum” of humanity, which is axiomatic in my dissertation. I believe this work also raises a host of moral and ethical questions that were previously abstract but are now easier to comprehend. I do not believe pplapi itself has crossed any ethical boundaries, but I think the line of questioning is now clearer.
“pplapi (pronounced “people API”) is a virtual database of the entire living human population. The current database contains 7,171,922,938 agents and is approximately 6.8 TB in size. ”
“Currently, Agent Space contains a simulated entry for each of the ~7 billion humans alive in 2014, who are all addressable with pplapi.”
athena 6.3.3: Athena Regional Stability Simulation
http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/AthenaModel/athena/blob/master/docs/developer.html
This software is subject to U.S. export control laws and regulations and has been classified as EAR99.
A modeling program for integrating social, military, and gov interactions in conflict areas
It would be interesting to see if you could get a subset of your agents to set up a group here, and see if you can devise a way to make them influence the model
http://unu.ai/
“UNU unleashes the brainpower of groups, combining their knowledge, opinions, and instincts into a Swarm Intelligence that is often smarter and more insightful than the individuals would be alone.”
Interesting.
http://pplapi.com/4869779458.html
How exactly did they determine language, religion, income, and neuroticism of a person who wasn’t even born yet?
It’s fake/virtual. I don’t fully understand the use yet.
Personality characteristics are partially heritable (i.e. a small amount of variance in these dimensions is attributable to genetics) and the global distribution is not uniform. pplapi implements a simplistic model of this general system, but the point is that many of these demographic and psychometric dimensions—including language and religion—are indicated prior to birth. While there will always be exceptions, pplapi models the typical case.
From the agent you selected, income is obviously implausible but all the other dimensions are probably in the ballpark. If you went to Iran (the country of that agent), then odds are, you can find a real person with those characteristics (excepting income, of course). Even better, if you sampled from Iran on pplapi and if you sampled real people in Iran, then odds are the distributions will be similar.
I know several ways to violate the assumptions of pplapi in order to generate garbage analyses, so there’s a lot of nuance here. However, I also know several interesting questions that can be answered with pplapi, so I think pplapi is nevertheless an interesting contribution.
Can you give examples of such questions?
What is the income of a 0 year old supposed to be? Shouldn’t income be very dependent on age?