| Director: | Pina Dietsche, Jakob Kneser |
| Camera: | Rainer Friedrich, Christian Eichenauer |
| Sound: | Alexander Czart, Alexander Joksimovic, Thorsten Czart |
| Editing: | Ruben Bürgam |
| Production Company: | a & o buero |
| First Broadcasted: | February 19, 2015 |
„Mapping the Future“ is the prize-winner of the Science Television competition 2015. The film won the „AST-Paris City“ prize.
Who will win the next Soccer World Cup? When will we take the next financial crisis? And where will the next revolution be held ? Predicting the future – does it work? Computer experts say that they can calculate these and other events better and better. Right now Google can predict the culmination of a flu epidemic only by analyzing user requests combined with weather data. Amazon already prepares products ready for delivery which we have not even ordered. And thanks to proactive policing the police runs patrol where they expect – due to data analysis – the next crime.
The documentary „Mapping the Future“ shows how mathematicians and IT specialists can read the future from gigantic amounts of data. The film also examines how our lives and our society are going to change if the future is predictable. How will life be in a world where algorithms estimate how well a child will be in school? How suitable it is for a particular job? Or how vulnerable is it to become delinquent?
The dream of a completely predictable future in which there are no disasters, wars and epidemics could easily turn into the nightmare of an omniscient surveillance state. The filmmakers Pina Dietsche and Jakob Kneser take the audience into different areas of life where the future is already predicted by Big Data.