Traverse me to life a little more
In the near future, every object on earth will be generating data. Website now track every user’s click. Your smartphone is building up a record of your location and speed every second of every minute. Smart cars collect driving habits, smart homes collect living habits, and smart marketers collect purchasing habits. The internet itself represents a huge graph of knowledge that contains (among other things) an enormous cross- referenced encyclopedia; domain-specific databases about movies, music, sport results, pinball machines, memes, and cocktails; and too many government statistics (some of them nearly true!) from too many governments to wrap your head around.
In pictures, charts and essays, Smolan is trying to show how a few software engineers, analysts, and data entrepreneurs living in what he calls a "strange new land" in "labs and boardrooms from Palo Alto (Calif.) to Bangalore," are affecting humans everywhere.
The creator of the "A Day in the Life of America" photo book and other "day in the life" books says this latest project was the toughest so far. How do you show how an infinite sea of bits and bytes of information flooding cyberspace is affecting everyday lives? His answer: in pictures of that life, from weather to war to the games we play.
Until a few years ago, the main function of computer systems in society, and business in particular, was as a digital support system. Applications digitized existing real-world processes, such as word-processing, payroll and inventory. These systems had interfaces back out to the real world through stores, people, telephone, shipping and so on. The now-quaint phrase "paperless office" alludes to this transfer of pre-existing paper processes into the computer. These computer systems formed a digital exoskeleton, supporting a business in the real world.
The arrival of the Internet and web has added a new dimension, bringing in an era of entirely digital business. Customer interaction, payments and often product delivery can exist entirely within computer systems. Data doesn’t just stay inside the exoskeleton any more, but is a key element in the operation. We’re in an era where business and society are acquiring a digital nervous system.
Smolan and Erwitt say "big data" have launched technological immortality, where "each of us now leaves a trail of digital exhaust, an infinite stream of phone records, texts, browser histories, GPS data, and other information, that will live on forever."; The very makeup of our identity.
Others say a new kind of human is evolving from the data soup.
"As we double the amount of data generated by all humans within the next five years, we can begin to model, build and scale to the point where we begin to directly and deliberately guide the evolution of ourselves and many other species," said Juan Enriquez, author of "As the Future Catches You: How Genomics and Other Forces are Changing Your Life" and one of several essayists in the book.
Smolan, a former National Geographic photographer, built the book around a simple premise: That "big data" are becoming a "planetary nervous system," the potential and consequences of which few have even started to contemplate. It’s "an extraordinary knowledge revolution that’s sweeping, almost invisibly, through business, academia, government, health care and everyday life," he says.
That revolution, he says, is being built on "a set of technologies coming together at just the right time, brought about by widespread and low-cost sensors that can now communicate with each other, the plummeting cost of computing power, the ubiquitous everywhere and always-on aspect of the Internet, the rapidly proliferating spread of smart devices."
The book is chocked with "wow" facts. Eric Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman, says that humankind produces in two days the same amount of data it took from the dawn of civilization until 2003 to generate. In 2010, AVG, an Internet security company, estimated that 90 percent of U.S. kids have an online presence before the age of 2, and that a fourth of babies born in the U.S. have an "online birth," often in the form of a sonogram, while still in the womb. To some, big data are allowing humans to design their immortality.
Enriquez, chairman and CEO of Biotechonomy LLC, a Boston-based life sciences research firm, points out that "today a street stall in Mumbai can access more information, maps, statistics, academic papers, price trends, futures markets and data than a U.S. president could only a few decades ago," he said.
Esther Dyson, who has invested in several big data companies, says the world now has "billions of intelligent devices that are self-aware, that communicate among themselves as well as with computers and, ultimately, with people". For most people, what they don’t realise is that, every interaction you make even with search engines is a two way street. You contribute to the data as much as you find whatevery you are looking for.
Jonathan Harris, a writer, computer scientist and co-creator of WeFeelFine.org, a search engine for human emotions, said new reams of data will soon routinely come from inside human bodies, "through pacemakers, biometric monitors, cancer-fighting nanobots, brain-based Wi-Fi connections and so on."
"Through the Internet, we are developing a species-level nervous system, capable of transmitting thoughts, ideas and information," he writes in "Big Data." "The resulting mega-organism - this 'global human being' - is also beginning to exhibit physiological reactions and even 'higher' human traits like empathy and compassion."
"The world is about to change forever because of this sudden ability to measure and sense the world in real time," Smolan said.
If you’re not contemplating the advantages of taking more of your operation digital, you can bet your competitors are. As Marc Andreessen wrote last year, "software is eating the world." Everything is becoming programmable.
It’s this growth of the digital nervous system that makes the techniques and tools of big data relevant to us today. The challenges of massive data flows, and the erosion of hierarchy and boundaries, will lead us to the statistical approaches, systems thinking and machine learning we need to cope with the future we’re inventing.
