The Speculist

Compare this item from today's Kurzweil AI news roundup:

The chance of containment of bird flu pandemic is limited as the pandemic may not be detected until it has already spread to several countries, like the SARS virus in 2003, and avian flu vaccines developed in advance will have little impact on the pandemic virus, according to Dr Hitoshi Oshitani, who was on the frontline in the battle against SARS and now leads the fight against avian flu in Asia.

...with this item posted yesterday on TerraNova:

The ever-connected Alice has picked up on a Shacknews report of a plague hitting TN darling WoW. Players beating a certain boss return home with an unexpected gift for their fellow players. Death, confusion and hilarity ensue.

Inspired game design or total screw-up? Or both? *

* For those of you for whom this quote doesn't make a lot of sense, WoW is World of Warcraft, a MMORPG, massively multi-player online role-playing game, with about 4 million players worldwide.

I doubt there's any real connection between these two developments, but in smarter world, there would be. Digital worlds are an excellent place to model human social and economic actvity. We are learning a lot from them about ethics, innovation and entrepreneurship, and real estate and other markets. A virtual plague in WoW might not have much to teach us about how a disease is spread -- there are probably more powerful simulation programs for that sort of thing already in use -- but it can teach us a good deal about the social dynamics of an outbreak: how people react, how they communicate, and what kinds of strategies they develop for coping.

I wonder whether anyone assessing the likely damage of the Avian flu pandemic has thought about what we can learn from online games? Ultimately, digital worlds may prove to be a valuable resource in staving off the next Avian flu, Katrina, or 9/11.

My Second Life self, Phil Speculaas, unfortunately can't (yet) work on problems for me while I'm doing other stuff.