The History Genome Project?
Like everyone else, I spent Friday with a bricked-up Iphone during the update process. But I’m willing to forgive Apple since Pandora was included among the available apps. For me, this is a killer app.
The Music Genome project behind Pandora fascinates me. It is a great combination of humans and technology – trained musicians analyzing the characteristics of music and creating a genomic breakdown of each composition, and then algorithms automatically selecting the music most similar to the pieces you select. It’s hard not to anthropomorphize Pandora’s inner workings, since it gets my taste so exactly right (and my taste is not mainstream, running to Steve Reich, Arvo Part, John Adams, Bela Bartok, etc.).
It would be great if that same sort of expert human/technology combination were brought together to create genomes for other areas. I’m thinking of things like a History Genome Project – having expert historians define “history” genomes and then classifying current and historical events based on their genomic similarities. We all know that “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it” etc. etc., yet I don’t really know enough history to always see the parallels between now and then. But if I could, say, type in a current event and have the 3 most similar events from history pop up as the search results, that would not only be a way to understand the present, but would ignite my curiosity to find out more about the cited past events. And how about an Economic Genome Project, bringing some badly-needed perspective to our current times?