GQ_Australia-December_2017

ver the past 10 years or so, there
has come into being a strange new
form of consciousness, a kind of
living global brain.
Just like the biological brain that sits in your
skull, it’s an impossibly complex mechanism
that’s built out of information. And, just like
a human brain, the masses of information it
possesses are turning out to be incredibly
useful for one particular and extraordinary
task – making predictions about the future.
In a way, we’re all clairvoyants. We all
possess these incredible future-sensing
machines that are made, in the words of the
celebrated neuroscientist David Eagleman, out
of “an alien kind of computational material”.
They weigh around 1.3kg and contain more
connections within one cubic centimetre than
there are stars in the Milky Way. Information
shoots around these connections at speeds of
up to 120m/s. Brains absorb information from
their environment and use that information
to build complex models of the world and the
people in it. They then use those models to
make predictions.
How do you know you’re going to be
hungry at 7pm? How do you know what your
partner will say if you tell her you’re not
coming home from the office tonight, but are
instead hopping on a Jetstar flight to Surfer’s
Paradise to empty the joint bank account?
How do you come to an opinion about who’s
going to win the next election, and to what
effect? Or, how good Scorsese’s upcoming
Pacino/De Niro/Pesci movie is going to be?

You’re able to make predictions about all

these things because your brain contains a

colossal amount of information about how

the world has behaved in the past. It uses

this information about the past to ‘see’

into the future.

But now, there’s a new additional brain –

a fresh, impossibly complex mechanism

that’s built out of information. It began being

constructed by all of us in around 2008, the

year after the launch of the iPhone, when

social media started exploding.

“Right now we’ve got a billion people, one

seventh of the world’s population, involved in

social media,” says Johan Bollen, an Associate

Professor at the School of Informatics and

Computing at Indiana University. “Every

second you’ve got tens of thousands of people

reporting conditions on the ground as they

perceive it. Traffic jams, they lost their job,

they’re a little anxious after the election. If

you aggregate all that information, you get

accurate real-time data about conditions on

the ground. But you also get data about

future developments.”

It’s not only information from social media

that’s building this new world-brain. It’s also

data from the GPS that’s in your back pocket,

from the Fitbit on your wrist, from the Opal

card that records your daily commute into

Sydney’s CBD and from your preferred net

services client, such as Google, that knows

all the things you do online, from where you

shop, to who you communicate with to what

your particular perversions happen to be.

We’re all contributing to the building of

this global brain with the constant streams

of information we make about ourselves.

And there’s a lot of it. By 2020, it’s been

predicted, there will be roughly 5200GB

of data for each individual on earth. The

ultimate ramification is that this brain will,

at some point in the near future, be able to

make uncomfortably precise predictions

about you.

Right now, there are two major limitations

to what this brain can do. Firstly, much of

this information remains siloed. Nobody

(at least, in theory) can connect the you on

the inner-city bus to the you who dropped

$400 at blackrabbit.com.au at 2.16a m.

Secondly, in order to turn all that raw

information into solid predictions, we need

algorithms that can properly analyse it.

These algorithms are the new brain’s

intelligence. No matter how much

information the brain holds, it can only

be as smart as those algorithms are. Both

these limitations will become drastically

reduced over time. As tech companies keep

rewriting their terms and conditions, and

state intelligence agencies find new ways

of tapping into this vast digital brain, the

information it’s possible to glean about us as

individuals will become ever richer, deeper

and more connected. The algorithms, too,

are rapidly increasing in sophistication.

The fact is, the future, ruled by ‘predictive

technology’, is not only coming, it’s coming

soon. But what will it be like?

DELVE INTO THE WORLD OF PREDICTIVE TECHNOLOGY,

WHERE YOUR FUTURE IS MAPPED OUT WELL BEFORE YOU KNOW IT.

THE

brain

of

tomorrow

WORDS WILL STORR ILLUSTRATIONS JASON SOLO

MEN OF THE YEAR 2017 GQ.COM.AU 207