Psychohistory

Is somebody running large scale agent based simulations with LLMs as the agents? As in, some three-letter agency that wants to predict political unrest worldwide. Some years back I read Martin Gurri's "Revolt of the Public" and Philip Tetlock's "Superforecasting". Prior to reading these, I imagined working in American intelligence to be something from a Hollywood movie: Cold War intrigue, fog, sinister motives. Maybe it's because I'm getting old, but my impression today is that most "spies" are more like investment analysts. They've got some area of specialized knowledge, maybe some biases from their course of training, probably quite a few spreadsheet models / favorite newspaper subscriptions / twitter alts.

But, has anybody made a really ambitious simulation of political activity? You could have detailed simulations of conversations between the most powerful 0.1% of the folks in the world, plus some random sampling of conversations between the rest of us. The "rest of us" conversations would be to generate summary statistics like: fertility rate, consumer confidence, etc. Most of the juice would be in the detailed scheming of the powerful, and the diffusion of opinion in those social networks. Surely the intelligence agencies have for decades been "simulating" conversations between the leadership of adversaries. This is just Kremlinology: talking about what they are talking about.

Having LLMs do the talking-about makes it less accurate (possibly), but much more scalable. So instead of the top 20 characters getting a voice, you've got 145,000 voices. What do Timur Ildarovich Yunusov and Anton Pinskiy say to each other about Putin's impact on the economy while they are planning real estate acquisitions to support Starbucks Russia?