Smart technology (wearable : clothes, watches, eye glasses) that records data on your life and has the ability to tell you what to do.
Voice personality profiling so that call centres can assign the right consultant to you but also provides them with information relating to your basic personality traits.
Companies using that data, big data, to generate value such as a retailer using big data to the full to increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent. Or ever-narrower segmentation of customers and therefore much more precisely tailored products or services.
The emergence of two social classes: the technologically connected and fabulously wealthy 15% and the rest of us relegated to a vast underclass.
"Vast troves of data on all of us and then using that data to provide us with a constant stream of advice on how to live our lives and make better decisions."
It is a policy makers dream. A corporations nirvana.
Will it really make our lives better?
Will this become our Gattaca? : The film of a future society driven by eugenics where potential children are conceived through genetic manipulation to ensure they possess the best hereditary traits of their parents. Characters in Gattaca continually battle both with society and with themselves to find their place in the world and who they are destined to be according to their genes.
Will it become our Divergent?: a society that defines its citizens by their social and personality-related affiliation with five different factions.
Will we become the humans of Wall-e? : obese, infantile consumers who spend their days immobile in hovering lounge chairs, staring at ads on computers screens (or Google glass)
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Professor, Oxford Internet Institute, speaks of the power of big data as a tool that has the "potential to shape every part of our society from health care and education to urban planning and protecting the environment." He also notes that But "like every powerful tool, it has a dark side too: It threatens privacy protection and human volition."
As Mayer-Schonberger points out the potential and current positives are plentiful. Data correlations help Amazon and Netflix recommend products to us.
He writes of the medical benefits such as the monitoring of "vital signs from premature born babies discovered that whenever the vitals seem to stabilize, there is a high probability that a baby will suffer from a dangerous infection just a few hours later. Stable vitals are red flags, and recognizing them enables doctors to treat an infant before the full onset of the infection. They know what, not why—but that itself saves lives."
And what of how we catergorise people based on what an algorithm determines. Data can be used to make assessments on people, on communities and characterise them in ways that predicts their life expectancy, their suitability for certain occupations, their voting intentions, their criminality and their purchasing habits. Data could highlight threats to society. But a threat determined by whom? Big data?
All manner of crimes have been inflicted on peoples from a call to arms of national pride, soveriegn borders, or the protection of an ideology. This could be our "Captain America's Winters Soldier", futuristic perhaps, but this is already happening. As Mayer-Schonberger highlights certain city neighborhoods are policed more aggressively because Big Data predicts a high-level of criminal activity.
What of choice, free-will, societal liberty and moreover to what extent will we become slaves to the data itself? Will we give up choice? And to what extent is a choice that is made from options presented to us by an alogorithm?
For me I'm still pondering the benefits which are immense and the social consequences that if not considered may lead us to a dark place from which only the data will determine our fate.
Perhaps I will become Amish. They're allowed Netflix and Wi-Fi yeah?
References:
Manyika et al, 2011, Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity, McKinsey Global Institute.
Reed, B, 2013, Prominent economist predicts smartphones will soon tell us how to run every aspect of our lives, BGR Media.
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, 2013, Big Data’s Bright and Dark Sides, Skoll World Forum.
