Predictions Grab Bag

It’s both counterintuitive and not counterintuitive to make many of the predictions included in this web article. Many of these predictions follow the projections we’ve made thus far. Others travel a path of slight chance and inference. Included in the article are 20 separate predictions, two of which will be the focus of this summary.

It not very counterintuitive to predict that in the near future rival countries will make bolder moves against the United States (topic number one). One thing many people can agree on is that history tends to repeat itself, and as mentioned in this section of the article, no civilization lasts forever. Better put, no civilization has ever remained at the “top” forever. There’s always been shifts in which country is the world power. As of now it’s the US, before us it was the UK, next it could be China or even Russia. Over time, the countries who already have a distaste in America could begin to become less timid in showing such feeling.

It seems counterintuitive, however, to predict that a vaccine will rid the world of AIDs (topic number three) in the future. I’m not doubting we will have synthesized a vaccine for AIDs and/or HIV. What I’m calling counterintuitive is the thought of eradication. The article uses polio as its crutch, however, despite much of our efforts in the past, diseases like polio and mumps are making a comeback. Now a few years ago I would have been a fool to mention such blasphemy, yet in today’s world, our free world, parents feel that they should decide what is best for their children. And this includes their right to not vaccinate their children against such “yesterday” diseases. Even if that right puts the well-being of every other child at risk. So when there is a vaccine for AIDs or HIV in the near future, it may not be of much use to us, since many people will opt out of said vaccine anyways.

How to Armor Planes

It seems counterintuitive to add extra armor to planes in places where there was little or no damage on planes that have returned safely, however Hungarian-born mathematician Abraham Wald would disagree.

During World War II, UK’s Royal Air Force (RAF) lost many planes due to the Germans’ anti-aircraft guns. The logical response to their guns would have been additional armor on the planes. However, in order for the planes to remain efficient, functional, and mobile, they couldn’t just throw armor over the entire plane. If they’d have done that there would be less armor, and fuel, to go around. They needed to calculate the most vital parts of a plane, and intuition tells us to armor the parts of a plane that received the most flak, however, that in itself is flawed because it is based on planes that made it back to base. Henceforth it would make more sense to armor the parts of the planes with minimal or no damage.

Massive Online Collaboration

In no way can it be made that using a massive group of people to collaborate through the internet to achieve a resource-demanding task in short time is counterintuitive.

There have been several projects where the use of millions of people world-wide led to a more efficient completion of said project. In this video, Luis von Ahn discusses his team’s project reCAPTCHA. CAPTCHA is the box commonly used on online registration forms with characters that can’t be read by computer programs. These are used to authenticate the user’s liveliness, so programmers can’t exploit the protected process, such as buying tickets or posting to online blogs such as this one. reCAPTCHA took advantage of the fact that over 200 million CAPTCHAs were entered a day and added a second word which was a word from an older book which a computer couldn’t correctly read. By doing this, users who enter reCAPTCHAs help digitize books, up to 2 million a day.

His team later went on to create Duolingo, the free language-teaching service. This uses a similar tactic in using millions of dedicated users to achieve an otherwise expensive and resource demanding task. In just 80 hours Duolingo could translate wikipedia to Spanish, a process which would normally cost $50 million and 5 weeks of work with 100,000 people employed. This kind of massive online collaboration is mutually beneficial and an efficient use of the fact that we have access to virtually limitless and light-speed data transfer.