Life and Leisure

Using the Internet to prophet on predictions

By Jules Quartly (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-08-18 14:39

"Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be, the future's not ours to see" is as dated as Doris Day. In the 21st century we are not about accepting what the future will bring, but rather predicting and capitalizing on it. We need to know. The monetary system is based on futures, and so are we.

Which brings us to a fascinating CIA and Google joint venture in the Boston firm Recorded Future. The company's brainchild is a system that mines the Web and divines the future by recording online momentum and sentiment. Using visual tools researchers hope to reveal the patterns and links between data and predictions.

The core technology at the heart of the system is called "the world's first temporal analysis engine" and searches hundreds of thousands of blogs, news sources, government websites and social networking sites to gather information. Like a million journalists on steroids, it will then sort out the five Ws (Who? What? Where? When? Why?) to determine what the future holds.

This is Minority Report stuff. The Philip K Dick novel popularized by Steven Spielberg in the film of the same name has at its heart a lot of hardware, software and three "precogs" who are able to predict a crime before it's happened.

While this is still science fiction, it is getting closer to reality. According to the Recorded Future website, American national security and defense agencies are among its clients. Computer scientists, linguists and scientists, including Fulbright winners, are among its staff.

So, what of its predictions so far? According to its "The Big Future for Social Gaming", major companies such as Disney and Google (cross marketing involved here?) will be ramping up their social gaming spaces to compete with Facebook. Apple is building up its gaming center for a launch in autumn, while Google Games will also be unveiled soon. The soothsaying is based on an increase in Internet whispers connecting these companies with social gaming.

In another example of its predictive powers, Recorded Future looked at the tie-ins between major companies like Apple and outsourcing manufacturers such as Foxconn, and superimposed this on labor unrest data in Shenzhen and Guangzhou. It found Honda might have problems with supply chain labor in the near future. We'll see.

It does make sense to look at the Internet as a source for future information, just as it functions as a repository of unlimited data and a time capsule of the past. It's the biggest brain we've got, in effect, and that's why I would listen to what it has to say rather than a guy with a canary in a cage, or a woman with a passing knowledge of constellations.

However, saying that, it needs to be made clear that divining a future based on past events (which is all that is happening here) is just that. It really is looking back, in the hope that it can determine a trend that will become a reality.

Currently, the most accurate prophet around is a Taiwan magician called Louis Liu, who recently managed to predict with 75 percent accuracy the events of last week, a full month-and-a-half ago. Perhaps the CIA should be listening to him?