The Future of Futurists Is Uncertain

by Steve O'Keefe on October 22, 2010

In a pair of interesting articles for MIT Technology Review, one of the best futurists in the business, Tom Simonite, says the future for futurists is not what it used to be. It appears that computers might be getting better at forecasting the future than futurists are.

Simonite is no slouch when it comes to predicting trends. Not only is he the IT editor for MIT Technology Review, he’s also the online technology reporter for NewScientist. On October 4, Simonite reviewed a new search technology by startup company Recorded Future that doesn’t just find what’s out there, but what will be out there, related to any search term.

The search engine works by looking at patterns of when a company says it will release a new product, for example, compared with the actual dates of product releases. The search engine can then make predictions about when a promised new technology will actually become available. Recorded Future founder Christopher Ahlberg told Simonite how it works:

[Recorded Future uses] a constantly updated index of what Ahlberg calls ‘streaming data,’ including news articles, filings with government regulators, Twitter updates, and transcripts from earnings calls or political and economic speeches. Recorded Future uses linguistic algorithms to identify specific types of events, such as product releases, mergers, or natural disasters, the date when those events will happen, and related entities such as people, companies, and countries.

In an earlier piece for MIT Technology Review, Simonite reviewed a new search technology developed by Yahoo, called “Time Explorer.” Like Recorded Future, Time Explorer searches through articles for predictions made about the future, then plots the results on a timeline so that browsers can see what is likely to occur on any given topic in the near future.

The future for Recorded Future looks bright. The company has received funding from the venture capital arms of both Google, Inc., and the Central Intelligence Agency. Being merely human, it’s hard for me to predict when this technology will be coming to a search engine near you.

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “See the Future with a Search,” MIT Technology Review, 10/4/10
Source: “A Search Service that Can Peer into the Future,” MIT Technology Review, 8/25/10
Video courtesy Recorded Future from the company’s YouTube Channel.