I just had to check my calendar to see if it was April 1st again. Google has spent real money to invest in a company called Recorded Future, whose technology ‘extracts time and event information from the Web’. That seems reasonable, but wait, as they say, there’s more.
By ascribing ‘momentum value’ to events and entities, then constantly updating the data, they claim that they can predict the future. Well so can I, but they say their predictions are actually accurate. I would never say that.
So it wouldn’t be reverse engineering, I guess it would be a kind of forward engineering of the future, or the “predicted future”, as they refer to it. I suppose that if you assume that there is such a thing, having a handle on it with ‘data analytics’ doesn’t seem like such a big leap.
Still, as anyone who has ever bet on the wrong horse will tell you, it’s an intriguing idea. As the company’s site reminds us:
“What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.”
This may also be true, but I’m not sure I’d throw money at a company that claims to specialize in predictions of the future when they use two tenses in the same sentence.
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ping :D
sorry, interesting article though..