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This article was published on November 18, 2016

This impressive tool uses big data to predict your future


This impressive tool uses big data to predict your future

Internet users leave combined data trail of over 2.5 billion gigabytes a day. That’s a staggering amount of information, and it’s information that can tell us a lot about our futures.

Predictive World is a tool combining big data, demographic information and personalized data to give a creepily accurate look at your life, including what’s to be expected for your future.

By logging in with Facebook, it pulls data like your age, gender and pages you’ve liked, and combines it with local demographics to create an awfully accurate profile of who you are. For example, it guessed my height at 178 cm, which is only a few centimeters off.

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After edited some of the incorrectly guessed data, I took a look at the different things it predicts for my future — apparently I’ll live to see 84, there’s a 7.5 percent chance I indulge in marijuana use and there’s a 0.004 percent chance I’ll die this year.

The entire experience is beautifully animated, and feels like you’re using some sort of dystopian supercomputer with all the world’s information.

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The project is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge, Sid Lee Paris and Watch Dogs 2, the recently released video game offering a sceptical look at our increasingly connected society and the risks it brings.

As a great tie-in for the game, it definitely succeeds in raising awareness for the impressively accurate profiling that can be done by using big data.

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