The Age of Predictive Engineering

Barcelona’s the Plaça George Orwell sign has an iconic CCTV photograph. Orwell, who fought in the Spanish Civil War, is amongst the prominent political and dystopian Futurists. He painted a state monitored by an interconnected web of security cameras in his book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Of course the idea seemed absurd in 1949, when the book was published. Fast forward to this point in time, video surveillance is an inescapable part of public life, with cameras in both public and private spaces. In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury predicted technological developments like flat-screen televisions, Bluetooth headsets, and rolling news. A Walt Disney television show in the 60s described automobiles that required no driver. These prescient technocratic social orders are being turned into reality as you read this article.

An SGI Altix supercomputer called Nautilus is the latest in the list of these futurists. This fascinating advancement in Artificial Intelligence has paralleled, to a certain degree, what Leonardo da Vinci, Aldous Huxley et al did. Here is its working model:

Big Data +AI = Predictive Supercomputing

Data scientist Kalev Leetaru from the University of Illinois fed over 100 million articles into the University of Tennessee SGI Altix supercomputer Nautilus. After analyzing the mood of international news stories, Nautilus converted incidences and locations of emotive words like 'terrible' or 'good' - into geographical co-ordinates via 'automated sentence mining'. Nautilus predicted the outcome of the Arab Spring and the location of Bin Laden to an area in northern Pakistan, when many experts thought Bin Laden was hiding in Afghanistan. According to Leetaru, only one report mentioned the town of Abbottabad prior to Bin Laden's discovery by US forces in April 2011. However, the geo-analysis narrowed him down to within 200 km. This analysis was applied to things that had already happened. The next stage is adapting the technology to work in real time, and the scientists are on it.

Leetaru’s research has steered us in the era of “petascale humanities” where computers can identify useful or interesting patterns if provided with sufficiently large data repositories. Another supercomputer in The Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center can predict death of patient(s) with 96% accuracy. Yet another example is the UNU, a relatively new form of A.I. application. The debate of a machine not aligning itself to a man’s morals, values, and aspirations led to Artificial Swarm Intelligence. According to science, social creatures, when working together as a unified system, can outperform the vast majority of individual members when solving problems and making decisions, thereby boosting their overall survival. This is essentially termed as Swarm Intelligence. UNU is a hive mind intelligence that makes predictions using group intelligence to arrive at a conclusion. It’s an A.I. which is inherently human. It asks users questions as a collective unit, and they answer to their best abilities. UNU correctly predicted the horses that came in first, second, third and even fourth place at the 2016 Kentucky Derby.

Victor Hugo said that there is nothing like a dream to create the future. Our dreams have led us to machines that can do numerous things for us. They can give mood forecasts similar to economic forecasts or weather reports. They can reflect our fearful preoccupations about the now and offer a terrifying indication of a possible future. It remains to be seen when technology will ultimately solve all of humanity's grand challenges.

A.I YOUTUBE CHANNEL: What is UNU?