The good news is we may be developing a primitive version of technology to predict future events. The bad news is that the future seems to suck.
Let me back up.
I have a theory. I think intuition is kind of like a mental connect-the-dots that’s as yet incomplete, but which has enough connected dots to suggest the ultimate form. Let’s say each intra-dot line represents a relevant fact, a piece of evidence, or the trigger to a memory you forgot you had—in other words, a piece of knowledge. When you have all the necessary pieces of knowledge, a clear idea forms in your head, just as when you have all the lines, you clearly see the picture. But when you have only some of the pieces of knowledge, you may only register a hunch—remember that all of this is happening in the background of your thoughts. The hunch is equivalent to the suggestion of a form on an incomplete connect-the-dots picture…. I think that’s what intuition is. It’s kind of like embryonic knowledge. Maybe a mosaic would be a better metaphor, but you get the point.
OK. Now imagine if this process were writ across a whole culture or civilization. Before something is known to a population, perhaps there is something like a collective intuition. Bits of knowledge materialize in disconnected quarters. Bit by bit, connections are made, but the big picture still hasn’t formed. Is there any way we could find those embryonic bits of knowledge and intentionally assemble them before the picture would otherwise, “naturally” emerge?
Some computer scientists are trying to do just that. Using ultra-powerful and complex computer programs, they send “bots” out to scour the public internet—websites, blogs, newsgroups, chat rooms, and so on—and try to tease out the zeitgeist via prevalent topics, emotive language, and I’m not sure what else (for a better, but way more confusing explanation,
read this).
Think of all the various and sundry shit people write about the Iraq war, subjects having to do with economics, the weather, the news, and so on. And they casually slip references to all kinds of things into their speech…how hot it is in Fresno, how expensive apartments have gotten in Osaka, and on, and on, and on. The program apparently can handle all of that. The collected public content on the internet is probably a (roughly) fair sample of the world’s present knowledge at any given time. To be able to parse it all down, distill it, analyze it, etc could yield something pretty close to a global intuition, perhaps. The idea is not just to enumerate topics of global conversation, but to measure shifts in its “emotive content.” What comes out are fuzzy reports that apparently reflect and refine not only literally what millions of people are talking/writing about, but what they feel, what they believe is going to happen (perhaps without realizing it), and why and when.
"Cliff," one of the main guys who do this kind of thing, runs a site called
http://halfpasthuman.com/. His reports are $70 when they come out, and $250 after the fact. They read like free-verse, computerized Nostradamus strophes:
“During this time, the [market halls/rooms] will [ring (with voices)] all (seeking) [their time (on the floor/to speak/trade)]. At this time, some [participants] will recognize that the previous period has marked the [zenith] of the [trade/swap (of paper)]. In concert with global battles being waged elsewhere, the [great/powerful men] who [rule (paper)] will attempt [to fly/exceed/escalate] something, in spite of many [warnings (public)]. This will be associated or marked by the appearance of a public scandal involving [influence peddling]. At that point, the [great/powerful merchants] will (publicly) [repent] of their (flying/escalation effort), but this will be too little, too late and the [peoples] will [not hear/believe].”A market signal? I don't know. The real art apparently lies in interpreting the data the computers spit out. On that score, Cliff at halfpasthuman claims the output is totally decipherable, but has lousy timing. That said, some people credit him as having “predicted” 9/11, the tsunami, and the London bombings, among other things.
Here’s a sample of the guy’s analysis of a reading (which came after "the" 9/11, btw):
“An entity arises which must reluctantly be named FoundationCrumbles. This entity represents what does appear to be a attempt at an [attack]. The lexical construct of the entity suggests an (attack) on a person, or in more singular language and so could be interpreted as an assassination attempt rather than a more general form of attack as we are doing here. The use of [strike](down) could apply to an attack of both a personal or an institutional kind.
“Further, the clustering of lexical clues suggest that the most likely time for the attack is the night of September 10th. We have a clustering of our distance values for this entity arriving at that date within the modelspace. So the suggestion is the night of the 10th or the morning of the 11th. And of course, in so far as the western mind is concerned, using a solar calendar, this would be the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks of 2001. “I would believe the bombings claims more easily than the weather claims. Theoretically, I suppose that if enough people have enough clues, and these can be harvested and compiled, maybe those people could “predict” natural disasters. But that would mean things like tsunamis are not as random as we thought, that they give out very subtle warnings long in advance—or that people are psychic. However, for human-created events, especially large-scale/ high-impact ones, I can believe that the masses out there collectively know some things that individuals do not, and that we can figure out what those things are. If only these programs could go through the world’s faxes and emails…how much do you wanna bet the NSA has something like that?
So, one must wonder what the computers are picking up now? Well, I happened to stumble upon what follows in a Yahoo message board for a small gold company. Now, I don't think Yahoo messages are a gold mine of knowledge and wisdom. This one, however, just caught my little eye. Along the lines of the
Marginal Portfolio guy in my last blog entry, there is talk of the market foreseeing trouble (by sending oil and gold thru the roof). There is the suggestion of menace and conspiracy and impending doom. It's great stuff, actually. Whether the markets—or the bots—are predicting anything, I cannot say, but seriously: doesn’t everyone think things in general are, well, kind of fucked up right now?
Anyway, I leave you with an excerpt from the aforementioned
Yahoo post:
"We reported to you on Monday that the Saudi's are making no secret of repatriating $360 billion from the US to other places closer to their home. After consultations with Cliff at www.halfpasthuman.com, I've come to consider the Saudi moves one of the most interesting of the past six-months. Just collecting the headlines puts it in perspective:
"July: Saudi Foreign Minister resigns
August: King Fahd dies
US shuts down embassies over terror threat
Oil prices hit record
"What would drive the Saudi's to pull out their money from the West without so much as trying to hide it from the public? A number of disturbing possibilities come to mind, but the two that are at our top of the heap are a pending Saudi production decline or perhaps the Saudis have a "heads up" on a financial disaster to come…." [continued on yahoo, if you give a crap...]
