Is that what you want? Actually, what you want may not matter, you’ll get it anyway. It may come as a surprise, but AI has been predicting the future for a long time – and very successfully. To the extent that we’ve been totally addicted for ages. Oh, we haven’t…
data
It’s almost like running out of gas, except everyone’s surprised: Oops, this thing runs on gas? Where can we get more and who pays? Of course chatbots don’t run on gas, but they do run on data and the data-pipes are about to close. How can this happen and can this possibly be…
How would you know it it’s lying? Most of us wouldn’t. Is that a problem? Only if you (blindly) believe what it’s throwing at you.
Historians and researchers are frantically trying to archive the Internet – including social media. Begging for funding to ‘preserve a rich data set of political discourse and communication trends’. Really? Save 500 million tweets and (say) 200 million Facebook posts per day? Comments, pictures, videos, likes, links, shares, the whole shebang? And that’s just two platforms and one data type. Insane.
The ‘forgetting curve’ is familiar to most of us. Occasionally a blessing, most of the time the opposite – like in the case at hand: Privacy died many years ago, but most of the world forgot. We’re pretending it’s alive if not well, and spend enormous resources trying to change that – to make it well, make it work. Maybe a short trip down memory lane can get us back on track?
Consider this scenario: A huge machine the size of several football fields producing products (or services) vital to the world. In the process, it guzzles more energy than a steel plant, ‘eats’ data by the shipload (think supertankers) – delivered via pipes the size of the cables carrying the Golden…
Obviously, there is no such thing. The world is seemingly nothing but great challenges these days, the ‘greatest’ being the one closest to heart at the moment. If you break a leg, crash your car or your house get hit by a missile, that’s your world’s greatest challenge right there and then. On a broader scale there’s climate change, war, fascism, pandemic(s) and more. And finally there is migration – on many levels.
All this hoopla about data, data science, data lakes and data protection leave the impression that data is a new thing. That data somehow popped up at the beginning of the digital revolution and became the most important thing in the world. This misperception prevents us from seeing and understanding the big picture. Including scams lurking just around the corner…
Data is vital to the digital economy. As vital as the red and white blood cells to your body. Which makes dataflow equivalent to your blood flow. What happens if you’re fed bad data? Corporate blood poisoning? You bet!
I tried, but I couldn’t quit completely. Significant reduction but still addicted – to the good feeling. That’s what the backup/archive system in the garage delivers. Peace of mind, a feeling of safety. Is it real?