Does Big Data Kill Passion?
A look at what Big Data is and isn’t
Big data offers a promise of instant answers to questions we either had no way of answering, or had to rely on the “gut feeling” for. Every day new data is being created at a rate even the Moore’s law cannot keep up with. We have to keep learning new terms when describing amount of information that flows daily across the web and now that amounts to over 2.5 exabytes (an exabyte is 1 followed by 18 zeros bytes, or in more practical terms 1 billion gigabytes, which itself not so long ago used to be an astronomically large number).
Big Data can be of two kinds: structured and unstructured. Actually there is a third kind — semi-structured data, but it gets too technical. To put it simply, structured data is the kind that we know what to do with, it sits nicely in a database and we can do all kinds of acrobatics with it. Think of economic data, census and statistical data. Unstructured data is the kind that represents over 80% of all big data. It includes videos, photos, emails and it is most challenging to analyze and thus more lucrative among the investor community.
As with any new major technology, there is a lot of hype, hope and buzz surrounding big data. Yes, it will create new jobs and kill many others, but it will not eradicate human decision making altogether. Big data will assist and sometimes take over, as in the case with self-driving cars, that rely on multiple sensors coupled with algorithms from companies, like Mobileye that analyze in real-time driving conditions and autonomously decide what the car should do next.
We have to remember, that big data can only analyze existing data and make forecasts based on information, that already exists. So what? You may say, people don’t know future either. True, but we — humans have what some call “the sixth sense”, or “gut feeling” that to a large part is also based on our past experiences, but not limited by them. As creative beings we sometimes just “feel” for a lack of a better word what is right and what needs to be done. This “feeling” is what we use instead of big data when making our decisions and it distinguishes us from the machines, it is our divine spark, our soul, our humanity if you will.
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
This saying, popularized by Mark Twain, gives us a hint on the limitations of big data and a possible answer as to why it is not a threat to human passion. Information overload is an inevitable issue that accompanies big data. Companies that are finding solutions for this problem are quite popular among investors. They know, that all that data is simply too much for anyone to handle and that means it needs to be analyzed and presented in a short and easily digestible way. Whether we choose to ignore the results of big data crunching is up to us, but having this option is an advantage none-the-less.
Henry Ford brings us to the final thought of this article. He famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Faster horses is what big data would suggest having analyzed population sentiment of the day and thank G-d we have cars and every other technological advance that we benefit from. This kind of innovation is only possible by the determined and passionate people who despite all odds and failures succeeded and brought us electricity, Internet, iPhones and the list goes on… And just like TV did not kill the radio, so will big data not kill our passion to create and make extraordinary things, that do not fit the known patterns.
So what have we learned? Bid data is here and it is here to stay. We will keep integrating it into our professional and everyday lives, helping us make informed “data-driven” decisions. We can always chose to ignore the data and turn off “auto-pilot”, but more often than not, as long as we learn to ask the good questions, we’ll find big data handy.
