Dangers of the Age of Big Data

Big data is going to transform how we live, how we work and how we think. Fifty years from now every aspect of our lives will be changed because of big data. Faucet that will be running water to wash our hands will include sensors that will be analysing our biochemistry. The toilet might turn out to be a centrepiece of the home in terms of healthcare because we will be able to monitor stool sample on a daily basis. If we did it every day, we might know about the progression of the disease we didn’t know about before.
While today that information does not help us because we can’t spot the signal that predicts a cancer few years out until symptoms exist, now we will be able to spot it.

We are in the very early stages of the new revolution, the age of discovery of machine learning and big data. We are going to do entirely new things because of it.

Unfortunately, there are dark sides of big data. It will improve our lives, but there are problems we need to be conscious of. We may be punished for predictions. The police may use big data like the Minority Report. It’s called predictive policing or algorithmic criminology. If we take a lot of data where the past crimes have been, we know where to send the patrols. That makes sense, but the problem is that it’s not going to stop on location data, it’s going to go to the level of individual, like high school transcripts, unemployment data, credit score, web surfing behaviour, whether they are up late at night, their fitbit data can show that they have aggressive thoughts. We may have algorithms that may predict what we are likely to do and we may be held accountable before we actually acted.

In the big data era, the real challenge will be safeguarding free will and moral choice. Big data is an improved version of Big Brother. We are laying the infrastructure to a totalitarian state. If we are going to accept big data with all the benefits, we need limitations so that we can preserve our fundamental freedoms and if we don’t have that, these technologies can be used for the detriment of human beings and we cannot let that happen. The benefits of big data are so incredible that we must address all the downsides and unlock all the benefits.