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As reported here by Wired Magazine, the US Defense Department is paying Lockheed Martin a $1.3 million, 15-month contract to help develop the “Integrated Crises Early Warning System, or ICEWS.  The program will “let military commanders anticipate and respond to worldwide political crises and predict events of interest and stability of countries of interest with greater than 80% accuracy”. The plan is to track “differences” in the global flow of digital information and generate intelligence by extrapolating evolutions paths using existing local situation specs. Much like pervasive intelligence theories, this “social meteorology” research expect to turn quantity into quality. Some experiences such as NewsFutures have already showed that the wisedom of a crowd, even a very motivated one, hardly reaches the level of expertise of a single specialist on a selected subject. Therfore I am very baffled by the money and effforts placed into developping a technology that is eager to generate misunderstandings and fatal errors. In my humble opinion, such project, if it is actually something else than a smoke layer over a money transfer from a government to the military industry, could be evaluated as a terminal proof of administrative decadence, a very harmful stuation where a self-disturbed macroorganism tries to implement sensors based on fulgy theories instead of rationalizing itself. We used to call this the Big Map syndrom where the map is seen as a true version of the territory’s reality. It turned empires into wonderful dramas. This time, it’s even more a religious tendency than a simplification of reality, an urgent need for a way to overpass human expertise, sensing and balancing. Sadly, the more we spend on prospecting the future, the more we may be surprized and pushed into negative reaction.