Imagine one day you see a news headline on Webtekno; “An artificial intelligence has been developed that sees your future and makes very accurate predictions: It can even predict why you will die!”
Okay, maybe the cause of death was a bit of an exaggeration, but the idea of an artificial intelligence that can predict the future is not something we can say ‘I don’t believe in life’ anymore… So what does science say about it? Can artificial intelligence one day see the future and offer a service like a fortune teller? Can he see the future of humanity? Let’s take a closer look.
There are already computers that make consistent predictions today.
I don’t think you’re too surprised by that. Calculating how the matches will turn out, offering odds on who will be the winner, forecasting the weather, presenting reports with calculations in the fields of economy, finance and marketing, calculating the probability of a business or operation to be successful, calculating the probability of a person catching any disease… for a large number of examples, computers already do this.
However, if we go further and talk about ‘knowing the future with absolute accuracy’, then the answer is much more complicated.
If you want, let’s explain this while we are on the agenda, over the question of who will be the champion of the FIFA World Cup;
With today’s technology, we can calculate who can win FIFA 2022. In fact, AIrsenal, the artificial intelligence developed by The Alan Turing Institute, said that Brazil has the highest probability of being the champion for this year, which he predicted correctly before.
But here is the critical point; Having ‘learned’ all the international matches that have been held for almost 150 years and gaining a lot of information about the teams, Alrsenal was trained 100 thousand times and could only make a guess as a result. This prediction is that Brazil will be the champion with a 25% rate.
So there’s no chance of knowing the champion 100% correctly?
To answer this question, it is necessary to first take a look at how an artificial intelligence works in such processes.
Artificial intelligence needs data to answer any question for the future. The more detailed data he ‘learns’, the more likely his result will be correct. Then this data is processed by a computer and presented with an interface. This is how the process goes in its simplest form.
In this scenario, again, going over the FIFA 2022 example, more data is needed for the most accurate prediction.
The players in the teams, the injuries of these football players, their performance graphics or their interactions with other football players and their results, weather conditions, data about the stadium, data about the ball, match times, all the information about all previous matches of the opponents facing each other, maybe even the audience in the stadium. Even the number of times can be factors that affect the outcome of a match…
These are the ones that came to my mind, there are definitely many more. However, despite all this data, the events that develop instantly and that cannot be predicted have effects on the result. For example, if a team’s striker, whose injury rate is almost zero, suddenly gets injured, this will be a scenario that artificial intelligence cannot calculate and can affect the whole result.
In the end, artificial intelligence will not be able to reach a conclusion other than what is reached with the data in its hand, and there is always the possibility that the effect of unforeseen events will spoil this result.
The famous ‘algorithms’ that we mention a lot are actually a kind of fortune telling, but…
We often talk about how companies such as Google and Meta collect our data and present us with accurate advertisements. In fact, even though we know it very well now, we continue to be stubbornly surprised by saying, “It’s unbelievable, I thought I should buy shoes only yesterday, but I came across an advertisement, son!
Here, too, we see that the algorithms of companies are doing a kind of ‘fortune telling’. Algorithms present the products that we have the potential to buy in the future, the accounts that we are likely to follow, and the events that we are likely to attend. But of course, at this point, there is definitely a person in the background who selects that data and directs the algorithm.
It is thought that in the future, systems such as ‘automatic purchasing’ may emerge, thanks to the further development of these algorithms and their access to more data. For example, algorithms that know when you bought your phone will know your phone’s lifespan before you even realize it, taking into account your user behaviors, and since it knows your habits, the most suitable phone will come to your door…
Of course, this example may have sounded strange as it included a question such as “Will you spend my money and buy me a phone without my knowledge”, but the issue we focus on is that the algorithms, by doing these, somehow know your future much earlier than you do…
As a result…
In the most general terms, it is not possible for a ‘computer’ to provide us with ‘absolute truth’ on any subject and to know our future with ‘absolute truths’ by fortune-telling. In other words, it does not seem possible to experience a situation like ‘you will know why you will die’, which we mentioned at the beginning of the article.
But that doesn’t mean it can’t make very good predictions. As we explained above, the job ends with the data that ‘computer’ has. However, we can easily say that an advanced algorithm is more ‘skilled’ than any other fortune teller in the world.
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