Google and CIA pool in to predict future; Hari Seldon rolls his eyes
Perhaps someone forgot to tell Google and the CIA that you need to invent faster-than-light travel, colonize over 25 million planets and set up a galactic empire before you can dabble in predicting the future, cause they seem to have jumped the gun here.
Both Google and the CIA have invested in a company called “Recorded Future” that has developed a “temporal analytics engine” that can find hidden links between online document which deal with the same data and events. It can understand complicated relationships by simply parsing text to determine when and where events happen, who’s involved, and sense the context as well. That too in real time!This data can be then used to not see the trends not only of today, but even their curve in the future to an extent. In other words predict the future.
So what are we talking about? Will it be able to schedule your pee-breaks for you? Not likely. Despite the high volume of information visible on the internet which has to do with events, public and private, what you can derive from it has limits. It may be able to predict a decrease in a town’s population if you detect too many fart-tweets from people in the region though.