Internet-Based Intelligence: Prediction or Foreknowledge?

“Intelligence” results from the evaluation and analysis of collected information. Pragmatically it represents informed, targeted and actionable knowledge, capable of grounding prediction of a probable future. Intelligence can also be described – in ideal terms – as capable of grounding “foreknowledge”. In this latter guise it is less a ground of prediction than of precognition. The present chapter examines these notions of intelligence and proposes two explanatory models: the “Laplacian” model and the “Practical Wisdom” model. Using these models, the chapter analyses “Internet-based intelligence”, which is attaining an increasingly high profile among producers and consumers of intelligence. The variety and volume of Internet-based and open-source information, coupled with increasingly powerful automated analysis techniques, could seem to suggest the possibility that we are moving towards the Laplacian model of intelligence as a ground of foreknowledge. This chapter demonstrates that this cannot be the case – for both practical and theoretical reasons.