Google
Australia has just announced the release of a revolutionary new
product called MATE™ (Machine Automated
Temporal Extrapolation) that extrapolates web data up to one full
day in advance of reality. 
According to a statement
released by the suddenly resurgent company, “Using MATE’s™ machine learning and artificial intelligence
techniques developed in Google’s Sydney offices, [it is possible
to] construct elements of the future.”
So how exactly does it work?
Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and
our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of
numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis,
online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle
weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the
internet will look like 24 hours from now.
The implications are frankly astounding. The ability to predict
information patterns and the statistical likelihood of certain
content is certain to disrupt established patterns of causality
underlying markets, social dynamics and even physical and chemical
reactions.
In Google’s own words:
We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the
web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news
events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even
predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours
before they’re written!
(cont.)
The transformational nature of this product has many futurists,
including the likes of Ray Kurzweil and the venerable Vernor Vinge,
scrambling to revise the bulk of their forecasts and particularly
their Singularity timelines. The new consensus seems to be that the
Singularity is most likely to occur later this afternoon after a
shockingly hard take-off.
At the same time, a rapidly growing school of neo-luddites has
been arguing vehemently against such a proposition. However, their
argument is not being received all that well considering they’ve
based it on data pulled from the Google MATE software following its release.
Only time will tell whether we’re in for a 3PM Singularity or if
this is indeed just another sick April Fool’s joke hatched by the
geniuses at Google PR.
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