Kira Radinsky of Technion–Israel Institute of Technology and Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research are researching the notion that the internet can be used to predict the future.
The basic idea is that news reports can be used to "make real-time predictions about the likelihoods of future human and natural events of interest." In the paper they describe how they can "learn to predict the future by generalizing sets of specific transitions in sequences of reported news events, extracted from a news archive spanning the years 1986 to 2008."
I find the most intriguing idea implied by this paper to be the notion that events can be "massaged" or even averted, if one knows they are about to occur.
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