Forum Moderators: goodroi
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
“The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases,” says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.
Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.
It’s not the very first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth. [wired.com...]
how can they read the future by monitoring twitter, and the like?
Every time you type an entity name in the What field of our web user interface, you get a sparkline indicating the last 30 day’s momentum of that entity...
The momentum measure is used to present the most relevant query results in our web user interface...
"If Google can do that, imagine what the military can do."
but how could they tell which way it would end up? the demo was put down in the end.
Psychohistory depends on the idea that, while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events. Asimov used the analogy of a gas: an observer has great difficulty in predicting the motion of a single molecule in a gas, but can predict the mass action of the gas to a high level of accuracy. (Physicists know this as the Kinetic theory.) Asimov applied this concept to the population of his fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered a quintillion. The character responsible for the science's creation, Hari Seldon, established two axioms:
1. that the population whose behaviour was modeled should be sufficiently large
2. that the population should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses
Timely in a creepy way... at a party last week, a friend I was talking to about Google said, "If Google can do that, imagine what the military can do."I know.....Makes you think twice doesn't it, about what the government really knows vs. their disinformation.
‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
