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He then uses those anomalous archetypes as a means of predicting large-scale global occurrences, from financial shifts to earthquakes. The results are subject to his interpretation, based on political and cultural context, among other factors.
The credibility turning point for High was his web bot prediction of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. As a result of this work, he discovered that prior to a major earthquake, his bot would detect a rise in language related to 'interrupted weddings.' "I knew the 2008 China quake was going to be a big one because of the interrupted wedding talk," he recalls.
Most recently, his site Half Past Human (which charges a small subscriber base for regular reports) was credited with having predicted the October 2008 global market collapse. But really the credit goes to the people who commented on blogs and other public web sites. "All humans are psychic, even if they don't know they're psychic," says High. This is to the tech-prophet's benefit. "We don't care about the conscious levels," he says explaining that it's what humans are unconsciously putting out there that provides him with cues to upcoming trends. He adds ominously, "In the last seven to ten years there's been a huge ratcheting up of expressions of fear in gardening forums," noting, "[Gardeners] are radically tuned into their local environments, which have shifted."
There are of course factors that could scramble his readings of the web. 'Memeering' is one of them. Based on the term 'meme,'--a naturally replicating cultural influence or trend-it occurs when corporations hire people to deliberately add content to sites and blogs to influence people's opinions of a brand or cause. The software designer by trade has figured out a way to determine this in his searches.
Then there is the case of the snake biting its own tail. "This is a funny business. The more people become aware of [the bot] the less effective we can make it. Consciousness will intrude on their language." For this reason, High has kept his subscription database down to below 1000 select customers, who on the honor system have agreed not to disseminate the contents of the reports. Though he admits, with a grain of modesty, "We are frequently wrong," he has nevertheless harnessed a roster of believers-professionals from organizations like Credit Suisse and Blackwater-even a couple of Brazilian billionaires-who swear by his reports.
Clearly, as predictive aggregate technologies continue to grow in popularity and we see new ones crop up in the not too distant future, it is likely that they will become a part of the pop culture they are attempting to monitor. So, while the future still tempts us to prophesize, High and his peers are clearly aware-like the prophets of the Mayan civilization were-of their own imminent demise. He admits, "My days in this work are finite."
Sound like crackpot computer science? Maybe. But even tech titan Google has veered in this direction with the announcement of its latest add-on. Google Flu Trends picks up aggregated queries that pop up each year during flu season. For example, searches for "flu symptoms" or "chills and fever" might appear en masse in a given locale. Flu Trends transforms such data into a rather accurate tracking system able to predict regional flu outbreaks in the United States about a week before they hit the tipping point.
The Centers for Disease Control already, in effect, do this by an age-old methodology called Contact Tracing, which surveys doctors and patients. The Google method is, however, 1-2 weeks faster, making it much more of a predictive early warning system. Though the corporation has no specific plans yet, its Google.org "Predict and Prevent" team hopes to expand this tool in the future to include other countries, languages and diseases.
Valdis Krebs, Founder and Chief Scientist at Cleveland, Ohio's Org.net caught the predictive aggregation bug as well. His InFlow software focuses on, among other things, Tuberculosis outbreaks. He has also used his skill as an expert in social and organizational network mapping and measuring to come to early conclusions about politics in the U.S.
In 2008, prior to the presidential elections he began using his software to observe purchasing patterns on Amazon.com as they related to Democrat and Republican books. In the middle of the year he found patterns of consumers who bought both genres. In October, that connection disappeared entirely. "I couldn't predict from that data who would win but what I could predict was that, even though you heard a lot in the news about 'undecideds,' it was going to be a pretty clear choice for most people," he says.
Despite his passion for the field of I.T.based prediction, Krebs warns us to beware of false prophets. "We don't want the computers to think for us. We want the computers to help us think," he says, "There always has to be a human element." He notes that prior to the global financial meltdown, even with the best technology and most brilliant mathematical models, many were not able to foresee the timing, gravity and all-encompassing nature of the crash. "If you just throw technology at the problem and forget the sociology and context, you can get into a lot of trouble," he adds.
Olympia, Washington software designer and "predictive linguistics" pioneer Cliff High originally launched his web scan system in 1997 as a tool for predicting financial market movements. Going with the premise that the average human only uses certain words in a given week, High attributed a level of intensity and archetypal significance to commonly-and less commonly-used terms. His web bot technology scours the Internet for aberrations-that is, surges in words (in various languages) from beyond that lexicon.
The Future…A Click Away
By Shana Ting Lipton
(Bright magazine)
pre-Dutch translation
If Nostradamus were alive today, he would likely be forced to upgrade his crystal ball to a computer with a DSL line. The Internet, it seems, may well be the prophet of the new millennium. Our tech era's mainstream and more obscure visionaries have discovered the Web's potential-as a data pool and reflection of the collective unconscious-to predict everything from influenza outbreaks to natural disasters.