CIA, Google Invest in Future-Predicting Firm

The investment arms of Google and the CIA have teamed up to support a company that says it can predict the future. Recorded Future—a Massachusetts tech firm that presumably saw the deal coming—monitors tens of thousands of websites and uses algorithms to find the relationships between people, places, and events in the past, present, and future, Wired reports.

The company says it calculates the online "momentum" for any given event, 100 million of which are indexed on its servers. "The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases," CEO Christopher Ahlberg says. Ahlberg—a former Swedish Army ranger—says the Google and CIA representatives on the company's board have provided valuable business and technology advice, as well as potential clients. Click here to see how Recorded Future could have hypothetically predicted a reported transfer of Scud missiles from Syria to Hezbollah in March.
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