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Internet Could Act As Ecological Early Warning System
Wired is reporting that ecologists think the internet could act as an early ecological warning system based on data mining human interactions. While much of this work has been based on systems like Google Flu Trends, the system will remain largely theoretical for the near future. "The six billion people on Earth are changing the biosphere so quickly that traditional ecological methods can't keep up. Humans, though, are acute observers of their environments and bodies, so scientists are combing through the text and numbers on the Internet in hopes of extracting otherwise unavailable or expensive information. It's more crowd mining than crowd sourcing."
If the data is accurate. If it isn't, it can send everybody off on a wild goose chase such that it takes you longer to get to the true situation.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Arguably, signal cuts through noise. If millions of people are wrong about it but in random directions, the handful of people that are completely right about it, and the elite cadre who are just slightly more right than wrong about it, might turn into a usable few bits of info on the subject.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
We already are overpopulated, we already are consuming much more than the biosphere is able to produce with sustainability and we know it.
So, anything that we should do when the warning system fires, we should be doing NOW.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.