Trustworthy Data Will Transform the World
The information revolution enables us to observe behaviour at mass scale as it happens
By John Thornhill
The internet’s original sin was identified as early as 1993 in a New Yorker cartoon. “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” the caption ran beneath an illustration of a pooch at a keyboard.
That anonymity has brought some benefits. But it has also created myriad problems, injecting distrust into the digital world. If you do not know the provenance and integrity of information and data, how can you trust their veracity? That has led to many of the scourges of our times, such as cyber crime, identity theft and fake news.
In his Alan Turing Institute lecture in London last week, the American computer scientist Sandy Pentland outlined the massive gains that could result from trusted data. The MIT professor argued that the explosion of such information would give us the capability to understand our world in far more detail than ever before.
Most of what we know in the fields of sociology, psychology, political science and medicine is derived from tiny experiments in controlled environments. But the data revolution enables us to observe behaviour as it happens at mass scale in the real world. That feedback…
