Skynet's Newest Intern

[SliceOfDog]

I'm both extremely excited and mildly unnerved about this newest article detailing a supercomputer that, after being fed local news articles from around the world, can predict major events such as the 'Arab Spring' and the resulting Libya conflict.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14841018

Now admittedly the processes it apparently uses are quite simple, and it can probably only make vague predictions (sort of like a Nostradamus automaton, if you will) but it's a promising start. I think a few years down the line a lot of people will be surprised about how predictable human beings can be.

For now though, unless the article was misleading (and it's from the BBC, so that's only about 25% likely) it sounds as if propaganda could entirely ruin the computer's predictions. It's possible though, I suppose, for it to recognise government sources and media and discount their accounts of things, or even, in a case like Gadaffi's, have constant positive reports be counted as negative because they are clearly positive no matter what just to fool people.

(And if anyone reading this has travelled back in time to save humanity, you have indeed reached the correct date. Please go to the University of Tennessee and destroy the SGI Altix Supercomputer, known as Nautilus, before it teams up with Skynet and destroys humanity. Much appreciated)

[Dusty]

I think I saw a special on that when history channel was on its Nostradamus kick. I'm not so much surprised that it can predict the future, I mean its just pattern recognition. I'm surprised they got a computer actually picking up on patterns more complex then ABABABABAB....

I can't imagine the programming.

[Terrapun]

It's not that scary yet. Basically it's just a media analyst on steroids, whose predictions aren't biased by experience and opinion (with all the advantages and disadvantages it may bring), and it currently doesn’t work in real time so there is no way of knowing how good will it be when it actually starts making predictions. Also, I don't know how reliable the information they are feeding it are. News are not unbiased. After all, they are created by human beings not machines. So we learn to take everything with a grain of salt, I wonder if computers can also acquire this ability.


It would start to be scary when someone, looking at the thing happily crunching data, would think “It is all well and good, but can it do something more interesting? It already works by measuring global “mood” can it devise a way to influence it?” And then bam! Global conspiracies! News tailored to alter ze world on a grandiose scale! Cats and dogs living togethe... no? Oh wait, I've been playing too much Deus Ex lately and it seems I left my brain in “paranoid: global conspiracy mode”, sorry.

[Daryn]

I think that there is some similar work being done in the US too. There's apparantly a project to predict the stock market's rises and falls based on the "mood" of Tweets coming out of Twitter. Surprisingly, it seems to be pretty accurate.

http://www.businesspundit.com/invest...-markets-mood/

I think that this sort of thing is going to become more common. As we get more and more signals to look at, we need more effective ways of sifting through them all. Computers are very helpful in doing that sort of thing.

[SliceOfDog]

I don't know how reliable the information they are feeding it are. News are not unbiased. After all, they are created by human beings not machines. So we learn to take everything with a grain of salt

Yeah, I do wonder if its predictions of events in, say, North Korea are strangely positive, based on all of the good news it keeps hearing about that Kim Jong Il fella based on state TV...

There's apparantly a project to predict the stock market's rises and falls based on the "mood" of Tweets coming out of Twitter. Surprisingly, it seems to be pretty accurate.

That does sound interesting, and possibly more reliable than the news version. I do wonder though how long it takes companies to make puppet accounts to subtly predict that their shares are doing well and therefore get more investors...