Numbers Game

By Viktor Mayer-Schonberger

The fruits of the information society are easy to see, with a cellphone in every pocket, a computer in every backpack and big information technology systems in back offices everywhere. But less noticeable is the information itself.

Half a century after computers entered mainstream society, the data has begun to accumulate to the point where something new and special is taking place. Not only is the world awash with more information than ever before, but that information is growing faster. The change of scale has led to a change of state.

The quantitative change has led to a qualitative one. The sciences like astronomy and genomics, which first experienced the explosion in the 2000s, coined the term “big data”. The concept is now migrating to all areas of human endeavour. There is no rigorous definition of big data… But this is just the start.

The era of big data challenges the way we live and interact with the world. Most strikingly, society will need to shed some of its obsession for causality in exchange for simple correlations: not knowing why but only what. This overturns centuries of established practices and challenges our most basic understanding of how to make decisions and comprehend reality.

Big data marks the beginning of a major transformation.

From “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think”