the real-life plan to use novels to predict the next war

The name of the initiative was Project Cassandra: for the next two years, university researchers would use their expertise to help the German defence ministry predict the future.

The academics weren’t AI specialists, or scientists, or political analysts. Instead, the people the colonels had sought out in a stuffy top-floor room were a small team of literary scholars led by Jürgen Wertheimer, a professor of comparative literature with wild curls and a penchant for black roll-necks.

linque: www.theguardian.com...


IIRC the Brits used fiction writers to help formulate projects in WWII

couldn't hurt to brainstorm with some clever people. there's always somebody thinking outside the box.

edit to add:
ongoing debate is, how much of history is mandated by events, and how much is determined by exceptional individuals. consider how much impact Osama bin Laden has had (even today). What would Europe history have been without a Napoleon or a Kaiser Wilhelm II?

There's a lot to be said for this, not as a prediction of the future but more for how events may play out in the real world. Those of us who write know that the logical progression using imagination can make connections that make sense and translate to the real world.

They've been doing this for years... SciFi writers have been very adept at predicting wars and how things play out in society decades before they happen.

originally posted by: Edumakated
They've been doing this for years... SciFi writers have been very adept at predicting wars and how things play out in society decades before they happen.

how often has the military/industrial/government group sought them out in advance?

A lot of 'Star Trek' tech is real now. 'Star Wars' isn't too far off the mark.

a reply to: ElGoobero

This sounds a lot like what Clif High has done with his
"Predictive Linguistics"

No doubt that with technology it becomes easier to
"predict " stuff like the weather , so why not
prediction of future events using laguage.

Almost everything "written" now is done using
word processors, and saved in a searchable format.

Heck ,if you go on YouTube, you can get the transcript
of any video that is closed captioned.

So it shouldn't be that hard at all to sift through
what's being said/written to get some kind
of predictive insight.

In fact with scanners and OCR you could create searchable
documents out of everything that has ever been written .
Then to test your predictive linguistics theory /programs ,
You could feed the computer literature ,say from the
years 1800 thru 1900, and see if it would predict
World Wars I and II.
Keep tweaking till you get promising results
from the past ,then try it on the present.

originally posted by: ElGoobero

originally posted by: Edumakated
They've been doing this for years... SciFi writers have been very adept at predicting wars and how things play out in society decades before they happen.

how often has the military/industrial/government group sought them out in advance?

All the time. IRRC, Tom Clancy said govt agencies frequently reached out to him to get his perspective.

a reply to: RavenSpeaks

Keep tweaking till you get promising results from the past ,then try it on the present.

what if these writters didn`t predict anything in the sense of foreshadowing a set future, but rather inspired the present to steer into a certain future with their writing?

what if you found out that a specific set of variables makes a story predictive?

a reply to: Terpene
I would think somehow that a writers "inspirational score"
would be factored into the linguistic analysis of his writings.
This would then allow for the effects of his writings upon
the populace to be predicted.

A writer's inspirational score would include
such things as:
Number of copies of his/her books sold.
Number of articles written about the author.
Number of reviews about authors books.
Number of movies/films made about author/ his works.
How many other writers think/ write on similar subject
Number of YouTube views

Does that make sense?

On an even deeper level , there is linguistic resonance.
(Think OM)
The cosmic effects that our utterances /writtings have.
Specifically groupings vowels /letters.
It's why we choose the letters we do to
describe our reality , because those letter groupings
"resonate" for us.

Observe:
drip ,drop, drown, drizzle, drain
drool, drench

glare, glistening, gleaming, glitter, glowing

Hope that helps.

Tom Clancy, Larry Bond, Dale Brown, and Harold Coyle are just a few of the speculative military fiction writers who were doing that in that 80's and 90's. There are more out today, but i don't think they were as good as what these guys put together.

Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising (which looked at a NATO-Warsaw Pact battle over the North Atlantic/Central Europe/East-West Germany) was especially good. It was required reading at the Soviet Frunze Academy. Clancy was probably the first (in the public) to surmise airfields/inland targets could be attacked by conventionally armed Land Attack Cruise missiles from submarines. And the campaign over Iceland would almost certainly happen even today if we had a war with Russia (assuming we don't nuke each other into oblivion).

Sighs..............

Get the people who autherd the books to do the predict of the next war!
think about it.

Ir would be really interesting to see what sort of global conflagration would get modeled from Jane Eyre.

a reply to: Scrutinizing
It would probably be something like this:

The scheming schemers, don't seem to have much of a creative lilt.

They're maybe not even good at anything, except convincing ordinary humans to do their dirty work.

" Want some sweet yummy carrots ? He-he-he.... "

originally posted by: RavenSpeaks
a reply to: Scrutinizing
It would probably be something like this:

I want to do them. Each and everyone.

a reply to: RavenSpeaks

Observe:

Interesting!!!
I immediately noticed something happening in my throat, and stopped. As I was not sure what to expect, and had some strange experiences in the past, when confronted with similar things, like music, or pictures.
that aspect of language has been on my radar for some time now, and it still evades my understanding, let allone its implementation. I don't like that at all, because I'm vulnerable to it, so thanks for the heads up.
If you care to elaborate, it would be much appreciated.

I guess you are spot on, with the crucial factor being the mass you reach.
to achieve this i gues you have to factor in set and setting.
sociopolitical climate, technological Standart, religious landscape, to name a few...
then it comes down to tweekeing the parameters until you get the desired outcome.

a reply to: RavenSpeaks

In fact with scanners and OCR you could create searchable
documents out of everything that has ever been written .

Most of 'everything that has ever been written' is inaccessible to anyone on this planet. You do realize people wrote before the Atlantis sank? You do realize people on other planets can also write? You do realize people can write in higher dimensions, don't you?

'Everything that has ever been written'? I don't think so.

However, if you LIMIT your scope to 'everything written that certain groups of people have access to', then it only changes to 'good luck searching Voynich Manuscript, ancient chinese and japanese texts that even the modern people can't read, hand-written kanji from a long time ago (even Edo Period would probably be quite painful for any automation to try to decypher), and so on.

So maybe not..

a reply to: RavenSpeaks

The cosmic effects that our utterances /writtings have.

Do those 'writtings' have to utilize proper grammar and correct spelling?

"The cosmic effects"? I don't think The Cosmos would even bother to laugh at this type of megalo-mania, where you think some animal noises have COSMIC EFFECTS.. do you understand what 'cosmic scale' means?

Words are just words, and have no effect on anyone. If a book moves someone, it's not because of words or utterances, it's what the reader -projects- to what they're reading, it's the IDEA behind the words, it's not the words themselves. It's the thought behind the words - and that thought can be told, said, expressed, etc. in a hundred different ways, and it would always have the same effect, even if the language is different, and words are changed completely, or if only telepathy is used.

Words have no power, they're just scribblings, pixel globs or figures somewhere. Animalistic utterances (which 'spoken language' basically is, just highly evolved) can have some more effect on people or animals, depending on volume, energy behind it, intention behind it, and other components, but just bare utterances don't really have much of an effect even on one individual human being, let alone the WHOLE COSMOS..

So maybe you could try to explain or refine your statement a bit? Your claim is basically identical to saying that one footstep sound of an ant can completely rearrange a whole galaxy somewhere far away. Words or voices can't have a 'cosmic effect' - but feel free to try to change my mind, perhaps if you have a really good explanation, I will swallow my words and apologize.