A shadowy group with ties to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies is seeking thousands of Americans to participate in a multiyear study at taxpayers’ expense that will be tasked with trying to predict the future.
Sponsored by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a division of the office of the director of national intelligence, the Forecasting World Events Project plans to assemble five competing panels whose members will make predictions about future events and global trends. According to the project’s website, their objective is to investigate the accuracy of individual and group predictions that could lead to fundamental advances in the science of forecasting.
This is the latest in a series of off-the-wall experiments IARPA has launched since its creation in 2007. The cost to taxpayers remains unknown at this time, as the program is classified. But it is not hard to speculate that it will cost the United States tens of millions of dollars, at least, before it is shut down. IARPA is the intelligence community’s version of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a Pentagon undertaking responsible for introducing an Orwellian domestic spying program known as Total Information Awareness (TIA). This program was a massive data mining operation that utilizes ultra large scale computers to track the movements of millions of American citizens in an attempt to identify patterns consistent with alleged terrorist activity.
In 2003, DARPA proposed its own forecasting project called the Policy Analysis Market for Terrorism. The plan was to establish an online trading venue whereby investors could speculate on future political and economic turmoil in the Middle East—such as coups, assassinations and terrorist attacks.
