Big Data

One of the great things about writing science fiction, especially near-future science fiction, is that sometimes you get to see your dreams and nightmares come true in real time. I confess I am not above pretending I am actually controlling these things like some kind of evil genius. Luckily I am furnished with a husband who can be relied upon to remind me of the various ways in which I've gotten it wrong.Yes, I was wrong about skinny jeans. I predicted they would be a flash in the pan. Mea culpa.I was, however, right about the resurgence of fair isle sweaters. Go ahead, dig them out of storage. It's safe to wear them again.Now, in the New York Times today, I read the following headline:"Government Aims to Build a ‘Data Eye in the Sky’"I won't get into all the technical details of this massive project, though you should read the article yourself if you want to know the future. But it very eerily parallels the software at the heart of my new novel, Scored. It's a super-intelligent software program that mines vast quantities of data (from the Web, traffic cameras, financial market indicators, and elsewhere) in order to tease out patterns that will allow it to predict human behavior. No human intervention is necessary in this endeavor. The algorithm does it all. And, no, I wasn't merely describing my novel just then. I was describing an actual government project, which your tax dollars are currently financing.As Thomas Malone, director of the Center for Collective Intelligence (talk about a science fictional name) at MIT says, "We have vastly more detailed and richer kinds of data available as well as predictive algorithms to use, and that makes possible a kind of prediction that would have never been possible before.”Now the good people of IARPA (which stands for Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) only want to use this giant hive mind to predict political turmoil and maybe flu epidemics. But, if it works (and, yes, that remains a big if) does anyone honestly believe it will only and ever be used for such things?I sure don't. That's why I wrote a book about it.