In response to such skepticism, reporters come up with their own questions and ask UNU to make predictions. And the reporters monitor the process. That's what this set of picks is - it was done for the BOSTON GLOBE, at their request, with their own participants:
They also predicted which managers would win the MVP awards, and which players would win the CY YOUNG awards but those don't get announced for 2 weeks.
They tend to publish academic papers about the predictions. This one is obviously too recent to review, but here is an academic paper (IEEE) about their SUPERBOWL PREDICTIONS, complete with formal statistics:
Personally, I'd feel unsafe. (I'm just trying to imagine getting in the back seat of a car, moving at high speed, with nobody in the front). That's hard to get past.
The fact is, we don't know how deep Neural Networks work - we simply know how they form. They are adaptive systems that learn to perform complex tasks.
This is scary because it means we don't "design" an A.I., we design an adaptive system and allow it to emerge. Nothing could be more dangerous in the long term.
Hopefully San Andreas will wait another 10 years, because by that time there will be no Nuclear Reactors operating in California. We are down to only ONE, and it will shut down within the next 6 years. PG&E is getting out of Nukes.
Most A.I. technologies emulate the biology of Neurological Intelligence. This A.I. technology emulates the biology of Swarm Intelligence.
A swarm is unlike a market and has been shown to outperform. The reason is that a market is sequential, subject to momentum and bubbles. A swarm is parallel, all the participating agents converging on answers in synchrony.
As I understand it, that is why biologists look at swarms as "emergent intelligence" that acts like a super-organism. The UNU technology creates such a system for humans, by enabling the real-time feedback loops artificially.
Traditional "Wisdom of crowds" are polls that take averages, which end up being fairly impressive. Swarms are real-time dynamics systems that converge on local maxima. It takes a little thinking to appreciate the difference, but it's profound. Swarms blow away traditional methods because they foster a real-time emergent intelligence, while polls just take a snap shot of group opinion. They're very different.