By profiling every citizen in a country, imputing their personalities and unique behaviors, and placing those profiles in an in silico simulation of that society (one created inside a computer), we would be building the first prototype of the artificial society. If we could play with an economy or culture in a simulation of artificial agents with the same traits as the actual people they represented, we could just possibly create the most powerful market intelligence tool yet imagined. And by adding quantified cultural signals, we were verging on a new area of something akin to “cultural
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