January 4, 2004: Web Bot Forecasting - George Ure
January 4, 2004: Web Bot Forecasting - George Ure  
Podcast: The Art Bell Archive
Published On: Tue Jul 15 2025
Description: Art Bell welcomes George Ure and his associate Cliff, a software programmer who developed "web bot" technology originally designed to predict stock market movements. Using intelligent software agents that scan the internet for emotionally charged language, they stumbled onto something far larger than financial forecasting. Their system detected a major event months before September 11, 2001, picking up references to a military accident involving the money center of the United States.The discussion draws parallels to the Princeton Global Consciousness Project, which uses random number generators to detect spikes in collective human awareness around major events. Art points out that both projects appear to be tapping into the same phenomenon through different methods. Cliff describes building three-dimensional models from language data, watching clusters of emotional indicators shift and coalesce over time into patterns that reveal future events with an eerie, almost prophetic quality.In a surprising twist, Cliff reveals that his web bots encountered Chinese source code from a similar military-backed program operating out of central China. After capturing fragments of their code, he endured months of cyber attacks from multiple countries. The conversation spans predictions about maritime disasters, power outages, and the broader implications of mining mass consciousness through the ever-expanding internet.