Hello all, I am new here and have just started my first thread. I have a few topics that I am dying to discuss here and this is my first choice to start off with. I do not have much other than vague ideas on this topic, though one can see subtle hints everywhere that this may be a forthcoming realization. Let me start with a few of my observations and viewpoints.

First off, it is common knowledge that politicians react very closely to numbers when it comes to who they try and appeal to. Media also is biased to the mass of it's population. The game plans that both media and politicians use is based on how it's shock value can draw in the attention of those who are connected to it's media outlet source. More and more we see that a politician like Obama is elected based on his ability to draw in voters through the appeal of body language and tone of voice, poetic speech patterns, etc. This all paints a movie like picture of how we are drawn in. All of this can and is designed with the help of computer programs that use trends, numbers, patterns, etc. to help design the likelihood of a foretold event.

We know that the military makes a good amount of decisions based on simulated events run on computers. Phones guide us to our destinations with little effort on our parts. It could be said that a good amount of Americans at least would be totally lost without their smart phones, and other computerized devices to think for them.

So is it possible that some of the governments of the world are starting to depend on computers to tell them the odds of certain events that are likely to happen. I mean, can you create a program that tells you the likelihood of an attack, when you feed it the numbers of people in an area with weapons and ill intents with the money and resources to back them up? Could there be a program that forecasts the country that the next terrorist will come from?

I think that with some effort one could design a virtual prophet that may foretell events far into the future. And this could be a huge tool for the governments, military, media etc. etc.

I think that the odds are some of the military and governments are trying to bring technology to this point as we speak, or already have very advanced versions of it out there.

Does anyone here agree with this idea or have any knowledge of how it may already be taking place? Please post any thoughts or info as I would like to open a thread on this subject.

Thank you.

Quauhtli

Originally posted by Quauhtli
I mean, can you create a program that tells you the likelihood of an attack, when you feed it the numbers of people in an area with weapons and ill intents with the money and resources to back them up? Could there be a program that forecasts the country that the next terrorist will come from?

Sure, computers already do this all the time. There's many prediction algorithms that already do this kinda thing and they're actually relatively simple. And they're used for various things. Predicting what email is spam mail, video compression, caching data most likely to be used next by the CPU, earthquake simulation, forest fire simulation, nuclear explosion simulation, pandemic simulators. Computers predict things all the time. They even have programs to predict where the next crime will occur so police know where to patrol. This year you'll also have a bunch of computers crunching poll numbers to predict who the next President will be.

And the number one use that most people never think about, forecasting the weather. You don't need a psychic to predict the future. People do it all the time.

The problem is, it only gives a likelihood. Nothing is certain. It can always be wrong.

"The problem is, it only gives a likelihood. Nothing is certain. It can always be wrong."

One of the problems with trusting the results that you get from running these types of programs comes from not feeding the right information or not enough into the program before crunching the data.

In the scenario that someone does create a virtual prophet, the information that is not included in the design is going to be what in the end allows it to make mistakes, and more and more I believe that we are relying on these types of technology to make decisions for us. My question is where does this leave us in the end? Will we be unable to think for ourselves about how to get out of the mess that an unprepared computer program got us into by making all of our decisions for us?

No ; ]

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