Author: Kenneth Cukier
Publisher: TED
Publication Year: 2014
Summary: The following talk’s primary idea is that when you have more data, you can see patterns and trends than you would have if you had small amounts of data. It allows us to see new, better, and different perspectives. We live in a day in age where we have more data than we know what to do with. Information used to come in clay disks. We still use disks to store information, but those disks are much faster and can store much more information. We can record information about the world more than we ever could: our location, our posture, our world is datafied. When we perform machine learning, we are letting machines learn about the world themselves. We feed in information, and the machine will learn how to perform tasks and can even surpass our knowledge and understanding. There are dark sides. Though, society may punish us for our predictions; for example, we can consider predictive policing. We may be able to predict if someone will enact a crime, but there is always the issue of privacy. When data was small, we had our privacy. In the age of big data, we need safeguards to protect that privacy and allow for human choice. Big data can also challenge white-collar knowledge in the same way that blue-collared workers were during the Industrial Revolution. We must take that big data and adjust it for our human needs. It is a tool, and we must always be its master.
