http://urbansurvival.com/week.htmSpecial Update
New ALTA/Shape of Things To Come Report
First Cliff at
www.halfpasthuman.com has in the past few minutes released a new "Shape of Things to Come" report (#4) - his first since last December 9th. If you have $10 bucks and want a good overview of what's maybe coming down the road towards us (humans) as presaged by shifts in language, then go read the report.
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The method of perceiving change in the future - based on shifts in language - seems to have some degree of accuracy based on past 'hits' (e.g. fulfillments of expected descriptor sets). Often times, these not as we project things will happen, but this is more a function of the limited scope of humans to properly interpret rather than any failing of the processing which is spread across several hundred discrete .EXE files and stitched together with glue, scripts, rubber bands, and subroutines such as to make 'spaghetti code' orderly in comparison.
Interpretation is the core shortfall. The human element seems to be weakest. Just as First Peoples in 600 A.D. would not have a word-pairing for "TV remote" or "9-volt battery" we probably don't have words yet for some of what will likely emerge in coming months.
Still, a key (and public) takeaway from the work is that the tipping point discussed in previous SOTTC/ALTA reports that occurred in (roughly) the Dec. 9 - December 21, 2009 window brought an unexpected change relative to 2012. Essentially: We lost more than a year and events once associated in the mass [internet] consciousness with 2012 seem now to break into the public mind in early 2011 with foreshadowing events late this year.
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A fair question to ask is why hasn't there been more notice that a new report was in the works? Predictive linguistics has an Achilles Heel: This method of predicting the future has only limited capability of being shared with the public lest it become self-referential.
The reason is that by putting ideas out onto the internet, we set up a kind of feedback loop which become extremely onerous in processing. Despite have a new (old/recycled) RAID array for this run, four processors have been busy for months running about 72% of their efforts simply throwing out references to our own works and writings. In the short term, it means more processing to get a large enough input cross-section and in the long term, it means there's a finite limit as to how many can 'know the future'.
Perhaps no clearer illustration exists than the term 'web bot' itself.
When we first started using the term to describe the project in the summer of 2001, predicting a massive 'tipping point' in human affairs which we didn't have a (single) word for at the time, but which would have aspects of 'military' and 'accident', the term 'web bot' was only occasionally referenced in obscure programming books.
Today, that word pair brings more than 21,400,000 references in a Google Search and stands as clear evidence that just injecting a new concept (or word-pair meaning/word-pair context) into the global discourse brings with it a set of problems (maybe even some karmic burdens, who knows?) such that our own linguistic footprint - the self-referential occurrences must be scrubbed.
It's like stomping around on the ground while looking for wild game tracks. At some point - if there's too much messing about - you'll never find the tracks of a wandering critter, no matter how good a hunter you are, since your own 'footprints' will obscure what you're after in the first place.
Time's an elusive critter and we have to deal with our own footprints since we're now 9 and 13-years into this little time tracking exercise.
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When Cliff talks about "not doing another report' (as he has in the past) it's not only because of the emotional burden of seeing the future (lots of dead people and suffering) well in advance - which means having to experience the worst of humans twice-over. But the second problem is the self-referential loop - almost a feedback problem - that takes time off the task of tracking the wandering critters in time.
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