This is a follow-up to my previous article about the web bot. In that article, I briefly explained what the web bots are and if they were able to predict anything. I strongly suggest you read the article but it’s not a prerequisite to this article. In that first web bot post, I made a slight mention of the “2012 prophecy” and guess what? Most of the comments are about the 2012 prophecy and whether or not the world will end in 2012. I won’t be talking about 2012 in this article but I will focus on the limits of the web bots because there’s a really important concept we all have to understand: Web bots scan man-made information. This article might look similar to my previous one, but is shorter and more focused on limits of web bots. It is a reminder of the core concept of web bots.

Web bots scan man-made information

This is the most important concept of web bots because it sets the limits to what the web bots are able to predict. This also explains why it’s impossible to predict any end of the world prophecy. Why is that? The main goal of a web bot is simply to crawl the web the same way Google would do it to extract important information from websites. That important information is usually the most relevant keywords on a website put with a certain algorithm that is able to get the meaning of the sentences the keywords are used in. This information is then put in a large database and the final goal is to compare similar topics to determine if they each point towards similar conclusions.

So, if we put all the pieces together: The web contains information written by humans, the web bots crawl that information, find correlations and make predictions. If the web bots take its information from man-made sources, then what can it predict? Only things humans can predict or have control over. Does that includes the end of the world? No. There’s nothing super-natural in web bots. It’s computer technology at its best: Gather, keep and interpret information the human brain can’t.

Sure someone can argue they sometimes predict the stocks market, but I know people who are damn good at this too. They can try to predict a whole lot of stuff, but it cannot go any further than what we can predict.

We have to be careful here, because web bots do have a power we don’t have: to merge all that information across the web and try to find a correlation. So, they can go a little further than what a single human can do, but they can’t go any further than what’s possible to predict by humans.

If it was really possible to predict incredible stuff, Google would have the answer to every question. Wait a minute…They do! Seriously, it’s possible to extract relevant information from the web but it has a limit. Google use the data it collect to do a lot of other stuff than giving you search results, but they wouldn’t be able to predict things humans don’t have control over if they tried. That’s the same thing for web bots, except it’s much more smaller than Google.

Put everything in perspective

Web bot is a really nice project but I think it’s going to be one more argument for doomsday prophets in the future. It already started with videos about the end of the world and web bots predicting it would happen in 2012. There are certain things we don’t have control over and we have to accept it. There are certain parts of our lives we don’t control and we have to accept it. Computers are useful but they’re not God. I think the web bot project has a nice future but always keep in mind the web is man made and the bots crawl the web: there’s a limit to their capacities, it’s no magic.

Some examples

What’s best than a couple of concrete examples?

Could the web bots predict:

• Natural disaster: There’s not much chances, unless it’s a natural disaster we can predict. We sometimes know in advance of a tornado and are able to predict the disaster. In that case, a web bot could do the same by gathering information from websites talking about a possible disaster on a certain date.
• End of the world: Unless it’s a very obvious situation or caused by humans’ actions, no.
• Terrorist attacks: Yes. at least it can help.
• Stocks markets: Yes it can help.
• You get the idea.

Hope it’s clear

I hope it clears everything up so that it’s now obvious that it is impossible for a web bot to predict things humans have no control over.