The first two questions from a Vice interview Emily Wasik conducted with Kira Radinsky, designer of powerful predictive data-mining software that crunches past news reports to provide probabilities of disease outbreaks, political uprisings and the like:

“Vice:

Is it possible to predict the future with today’s technology?

Kira Radinsky:

We have reached a critical amount of data and computation power to start finding repeating patterns in history systematically. We built a predictive model based on more than 150 years of historical news data that examines past events with similar outcomes. Our system also incorporates related contextual information pulled from LinkedData, a project that finds connections between hundreds of resources. The combination allows the software to extrapolate from news of a cholera outbreak in Angola, for example, to predict a similar outbreak in Rwanda.

Vice:

So do you believe that history has a tendency to repeat itself?

Kira Radinsky:

The probabilities are always changing, but some patterns, if we abstract them correctly, always remain. And if we incorporate the most recent information we can learn about new patterns emerging all the time. Think about how children learn—they receive reinforcement from the environment and learn patterns. This is also how we learn. I would say the work I have done is not about predicting the future, it is more about making deep analysis on probabilities of future outcomes based on what we have seen, just as an expert in the field would do if he had the time to look at all the available data in the world.”