Posted by davidbfpo,

Having immersed myself in data-mining, data collection and similar subjects I remain a critic of this approach - both in the domestic and overseas expeditionary contexts.
As you should, to date most efforts have produced little of value, but on the other hand (and to my knowledge they are not published publicly) there have been examples of successes that show what is possible now, and of course more will be possible in the future.

Of course a lot data isn't digitized, and even if it is it isn't readily available so it be fused with other sets of data, or it isn't structured, and the list of challenges goes on and on, but over time many of those challenges can be addressed.

Artificial intelligence will never replace the power of the human brain (I might be an exception) in our life times, but if you look at a cyborg capability where it simply augments our ability to see patterns and potentially identify links between events and actors not previously visible then I think there is considerable value added.

Additionally, and I haven't seen this discussed yet in any of my readings, to maximize these capabilities we will have to re-engineer our information/intelligence collection processes to stream line the process from collection to transition to structured data that is available to be fused by those with access with these programs. Note that this study used open source data from the media, imagine if they were able to also fuse open source with classified data.

We're definitely not there yet, but I think we're on the road to a "better" crystal ball that will only serve to augment the most important element in the process, which is the human mind. The danger is we'll get some people in the system (seen it before) that wants a system that will replace humans, so hopefully we can keep those idiots marginalized.