Monday, August 3, 2009

Can You See the Future?

Is it possible to see into the future? At first thought, this long-reaching feat seems almost impossible. Seeing the future seems too far down the technological road for anyone existing this century to ever be a part of. Considering the vast potential of the internet though, this notion of impossibility is, to me, a surprisingly extreme and hasty assumption to make.
The internet holds, within its network, a considerably large amount of data that can be compiled in any random order, or investigated in any superficial way. Therefore, having one person and/or one computer analyze only a small bit of data or one idea on the internet at a time is pointless to the rest of the world. All this seemingly trivial data, however, must be able to be compiled in a unique way to allow any one person or computer to display a more invariant behavior pattern of information. Thus, the interpreter will then be led to an understanding of the variations in ideas and information people decide to display on the internet. This is an example of normalizing all of the possible probabilities of a certain event occurring on the internet.
With an advanced understanding of the fields of economics, sociology, psychology, and statistics, I believe that the rather stochastic behavior of: social interaction, social choice, and ultimately, socioeconomic choice (in demand) and transnational corporate choice (advertisement/supply choice/marketing choice) can be statistically measured, estimated, and used for global economic and social benefit.
A collaborative effort between groups of programmers, hackers and politicians...amongst many economists, sociologists and mathematicians... must be taken to even attempt to create a program that can compile all data; from all existing blog posts, companies, marketing trends, old stock info., etc. and then analyze this data, according to some sort of advanced algorithm involving probabilities and their real-time sums, to understand what numerical values the stochastic variables of complex social life most likely take on. Understanding what will happen next with all global-data will let the people of the world understand, more precisely, the effects of the choices that they and their peers make.