Every day, internet users leave associated data series of over 2.5 gigabytes. With this incredible amount of information, it’s quite possible to tell a lot about our future.
Predictive World
Keeping that in mind, Ubisoft just unveiled Predictive World, an online tool that provides creepily accurate predictions about your future based on big data, personalized data, and demographic information.
Inspired by Watch Dogs 2
The algorithm of Predictive World is developed by the Psychometrics Centre of the University of Cambridge, where a broad range of verified data sources such as social media and psychological data from over 6 million participants, as well as bespoke infrastructure carrying 6.4 billion data points, have been used. It’s the collaboration between the University of Cambridge and Watch Dogs 2, a recently released game, where Marcus Holloway, a young hacker is wrongly profiled by a predictive system. This game offers a skeptical look at the danger of Big Data and predictive algorithms.
Inspired by this game, Predictive World is a real world analytical program based on actual research that predicts our future.
It will ask you to log in with Facebook or enter your basic information while you visit the website. After signing in, it collects data such as your gender, age, and pages you’ve liked, and combined them with local demographics to generate a terribly accurate profile of who you are. Not everything is accurate, such as it says my weight is 71 kg, which is a few kg off. Apart from this, I eventually ended up with a smoking risk of 1.1%, life expectancy of 84.5 years and a homicide risk of 0.008%.
It seems fun at the initial stage. It’s not perfect yet, but surely a great tool to raise awareness about how accurate profiling can be made using big data.
