I remember being a uni student at a career fair nearly a decade ago and the folks at the CIA booth were wanting to hire to "predict the next Arab Spring" (which at that time was fully underway). When I asked a little bit, they didn't divulge more and weren't interested in me (my degree is not comp sci).
I've just been assuming this sort of work has been going on since then.
The idea of the military arm of the U.S. government predicting the next Arab Spring reminds me of that classic mind-bender of a quote, which I think is often misunderstood as a defense of lying to the public, when it is about something deeper:
> The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Have you heard of the free energy principle? The two ideas seem related.
From Wikipedia:
> The free energy principle is that systems—those that are defined by their enclosure in a Markov blanket—try to minimize the difference between their model of the world and their sense and associated perception. This difference can be described as "surprise" and is minimized by continuous correction of the world model of the system. As such, the principle is based on the Bayesian idea of the brain as an “inference engine.” [Karl] Friston added a second way to minimization: action. By actively changing the world into the expected state, systems can also minimize the free energy of the system. Friston assumes this to be the principle of all biological reaction.
Right, thats about when I also heard pitches about the same. Perhaps social media has changed now. I certainly use it differently. Or perhaps the US Military takes a decade to get research like this going?
Probably it's ongoing in defense research, just usually not much comes of it and it's not published a lot. I did something tangentially like this if you squint at it the right way, maybe 10-12 years ago, for some defense research grant. It would shock me if they didn't have a dozen other parallel grants going with other companies at the same time, and more since then.
I've just been assuming this sort of work has been going on since then.