Predictive analytics is a fancy way of saying,
look at the data and figure out why things happen.
Very important-- banks, corporations,
computer companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars
sifting through tons of data, trying
to find instances of causality.
If I raise the price of a product,
does my profit margin go down?
Will I go bankrupt?
In other words, corporations constantly
try to predict the future.
That's the name of the game.
You predict it wrong, you zag when you should zig,
you go bankrupt.
I think predictive analytics operate very similarly
to how our brains work.
Our minds come equipped to make predictions about the future
based on our past experiences.
And they operate very similarly.
In fact, machine learning algorithms,
the type that carry out predictive analytics,
are often called neural network models
because they're designed to mimic
how neurons work in our brains.
WILLIAM SHATNER: The idea of advanced computers pulling
information from the cloud in order
to predict the future may sound like science fiction.
But in truth, this idea has been around for thousands of years.
Every culture in history has had some concept
of a universal mind.
The Greeks used to call it nous, or a great over-mind.
In Vedic tradition, it's sometimes called akasha,
or a kind of universal ether.
People like Nostradamus and any seer
will tune in to what we call the Akashic record.
This is like the memory of all things.
It's a universal mind.
We enter it by going into a state of meditation
and connecting with the past, the present, and the future.
One of the great secrets of the mystical tradition
is that all human souls are one.
So we are part of a collective whole.
In later psychology, it has been understood to be called
a collective unconscious.
In ancient times, it was referred
to as a collective soul, which is
the collective mind of all humanity,
past, present, future.
I think the people who work in this way, what they're doing
is they're tapping into some source of information.
I don't think the question is why are we able to get
information about the future?
I think the question is more like, why don't we get more
information about the future?
A universal mind, all-knowing and all-encompassing.
But do we really want to know everything before it happens?
Time of our own death perhaps, or the fate of our loved ones,
or how about the end of the world?
Perhaps we're better off not knowing, letting those things
remain the unexplained.