5th Global Conference
Session Five: Playing War, Playing Peace. Enemies Real and Imagined
Chair: Timothy Hoyt
Baby Sitting or Bird Watching; Creative Learning in Conflict Resolution
Gideon Shimshon
Pax Ludens, The Netherlands
This paper is about ways to create better learning environments that help transfer and create knowledge on conflict dynamics. Today's military academies need to adapt to a new era. There is a growing interest in multicultural exchange, coupled with a by far greater mobility and ever more sophisticated technology, able to connect people across continents twenty-four-seven. As a result, security professionals accept the need to interpret the world in a global context, and are keen to embrace the dogma of multi-disciplinary learning where people go beyond their own field expertise and draw from other disciplines. It is the need to 'understand the other' which brings people together in training environments, in a bid to improve each others insights and to enhance one's chances to perform better in a changing world. Our approach to training and research into conflict dynamics in the military provides a learning environment and space to explore aspects of conflict through organizational, operational, and strategic aspects embedded in the reality of the conflict at hand.
The World of Warcraft: Creating a Safe and Secure Place for an Entertaining War
Michael Nagenborg
MMORPGs as "World of Warcraft" can be understood as interactive representation of war. Within the frame provided by the program the players experience martial conflicts and thus a “virtual war” (e.g. MacCallum-Stewart 2007). The game world however requires a technical and as far as possible invisible infrastructure which has itself to be protected against attacks: Among this infrastructure are counted e.g. the servers on which the data of the player characters and the game’s world are saved, as well as the user accounts, which have to be protected, among other things, against "identity theft" (e.g. Bardzell et al. 2007). Besides the war on the virtual surface of the program we will therefore describe the invisible war about the infrastructure, whose outbreak is always feared by the developers and operators of online-worlds and at least requires adequate precautions.
Furthermore we would like to pick out „virtual game worlds“ as a central theme as places of complete observation. Since action in these worlds is always associated with the production of data, complete observation is at least possible and given in reality by the so-called „game master“. Observation of different communication channels (inclusive user forums) as well serves for channeling the sojourn in the virtual battlefield properly, without the player feeling apparently limited in his freedom. Finally we would like to compare the fictional theater of war of "World of Warcraft" with the vision of "Network-Centric Warfare", since already many a time it was affirmed that the analysis of MMORPGs could be useful for the real trade of war (cf. e.g. Sarasin 2004, p. 24). However, we will point out what an unrealistic theater of war "World of Warcraft" is.
Vernor Vinge’s ’Technological Singularity’
Kostas Physentzides
Department of Urban & Regional Planning, University of Thessaly, Pedion Areos, Volos, Greece
In recent armed conflicts (i.e. USA invading Iraq) the use of cyberspace technology has been one of the most effective tools. In parallel, research continuous on the use of new technologies (e.g. nanotechnology, molecular biology, telecommunications, Artificial Intelligence, and robotics) that could be used against the enemy. But what happens when the enemy itself is a super intelligent entity whose being is made of these technologies?
Welcome to Vernor Vinge’s ‘technological singularity’ scenario, introduced at NASA’s Symposium VISION-21 (March 1993). Vinge and other scientists believe that, sometime around the 2030’s, the convergence of the new technologies will create a super intelligence (more intelligent than a human being). That super intelligence will have the ability to control resources, through the mediation of cyberspace, at a global scale and, potentially, threaten humanity’s survival (http://www.singinst.org/).
The ‘technological singularity’ scenario brings humanity at the boundary before a fundamental global shift in consciousness. It is not only imperative that we learn how to correctly use and share our planet’s resources but, at the same time, there is an urgent need to understand, and peacefully resolve, conflicts springing from within human thoughts and feelings.
If wars first start in the thoughts of people then peaceful conflict resolutions can be achieved through right ways of thinking. But human beings are not only characterized by mentality and physicality, but also by feelings and emotions. Could scientists codify feelings, such as the feeling of love, into a super intelligent being? Could the embedding of emotions and code of ethics -such as Isaac Asimov’s three laws of robotics- into robots make them respect and protect life in its many expressions? It seems that correct use of these new technologies within the next few decades will determine our civilization’s survival.