In early December each year, Time Magazine gets ready to announce their Person of the Year, a designation they describe as “the person, group, idea, or object that for better or for worse has done the most to influence the events of the year.”  In the weeks leading up to this announcement, Time Magazine conducts a massive poll of its readers around the world, asking them to vote on who they think should be the person of the year.

This year they polled over 9 MILLION people and determined the most popular answer.  This is often referred to as the “wisdom of the crowd,” and should reflect a high degree of collective intelligence.  So, what did the group say? Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro

Here at Unanimous AI, we also predict the Person of the Year, but we don’t use 9 million people. In fact, this year we only used 21 people, randomly selected from around the US through an online service. Of course, we didn’t take a simple poll. Instead, we had this small group of participants log into our software platform called Swarm®, an online collaboration tool where they were able forecast together as a real-time Swarm Intelligence moderated by AI algorithms.

And just like previous years, our method came up with a very different prediction than Time’s largescale poll. Our forecast for the 2021 Person of the Year is: The Doctors, Nurses, and Scientists fighting Coronavirus as First Responders and Developing Vaccines.  Now we just need to wait and see what the editors of Time Magazine announce on Monday.

Support Density plot of real-time Swarm Intelligence