The Wisdom of Crowds
May 18, 2011
We'll get a little place right next to the Google block.
Everyone loves a good infographic. Right? Over at xkcd, there’s a long timeline about things that are going to happen in the future. Randall Munroe, xkcd’s author, apparently queried things to come by searching the vast collective wisdom archived, algorithmically indexed, and multiply palped by the great digital octopus, Google. The results are pretty hilarious, and bely the bleak streak running through the collective unconsciousness’s current vision of the next century. And also, they show that curious aspect of wisdom, especially the wisdom of crowds–the truly wise crowd is self-contradictory and often hedges its bets by speaking outta both sides of its mouth. Apparently the digital hordes are unaware of the point when MBP is going to purchase the entire island of Manhattan, so I’ve added an event to their calendars.
