Want to know if a dictator will be deposed? Or shares will crash? Intelligence agencies and firms are realising groups of everyday people can foresee what will happen

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EVERY day after breakfast, Shannon Gifford would sit down at her computer for an hour and scour obscure corners of the internet for clues. The questions she was attempting to answer changed. Once she was trying to find out whether radioactive poison would be discovered in the body of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. At other times she was working out whether the price of oil would rise above $60 a barrel that year, or predicting the outcome of a forthcoming presidential election in Ghana.

Gifford isn’t an investor, a spy or even an insatiably curious news junkie. Alongside hundreds like her, she was part of an extraordinary experiment to find out whether the wisdom of the crowd can predict the future.

The answer surprised even the US intelligence officials behind the experiment. It turns out crowds really can make accurate predictions – so accurate, in fact, that they promise to permanently change how states analyse intelligence.

We have known some of the benefits of collective wisdom since Aristotle, but a slightly more recent example features in the 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds by journalist James Surowiecki. The opening pages tell the story of the day Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton went to a country fair. Galton, a formidable scientist himself, asked people to guess the weight of an enormous ox. Most got it absurdly wrong, but the median guess of the 800-strong crowd was just 1 pound off the true weight of the ox, which for the record was 1198 pounds, or 543 kilograms.

The wisdom of crowds is an integral part of life today. We try …