How will what has happened in the past (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show) be different from what will happen tomorrow? Google has invested an undisclosed amount of money in a startup company that says it can predict the future, something our resident prophet John Hogue is going to talk about this weekend.
The company doesn’t sell any products, but says it has developed software that can predict the stock market and terrorist activity by keeping track of how often the same person or event is mentioned somewhere on the web.
In Computer World, James Niccolai quotes a company blog as saying, “At Recorded Future, we compute a momentum value for each entity and event in our database. The momentum value indicates how interesting a certain event or entity is at a particular time, and is continuously updated. In computing the momentum value, we take into account the volume of news around an entity or event, as well as what sources it is mentioned in, what other events and entities it is mentioned together with, and several other factors. The momentum measure is used to present the most relevant query results in our web user interface, but it can also be analyzed using statistical methods to predict possible future changes in momentum, which in turn can be valuable, e.g. for trading decisions.”
Soon the web will control EVERYTHING! Does this mean that we humans will be living “virtual” lives?
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