Tom was tweeting about Big Data & Gamification & Algorithmic determinism this morning. Though the thread here is not 100% transparent, we thought you might be amused.
Tom's tweets:
As I dig deeper into big data/algorithmic determinism/gamification I am appropriately impressed but feel as if the world is being sterilized.
Read big data/gamification/algorithmic gurus and wonder where the human beings/humanity have gone. Exabyte/zettabyte/yottabyte heaven awaits.
Loyalty 3.0 and The Gamification Revolution are my two latest Amazon acquisitions. I have no idea what I think.
"Why" [questions of causation] may become obsolete & insurance be denied because you had a Zoroastrian college roommate, but human chaos will continue to reign.
But will your sociology department be a hotbed of revolutionary thought with faculty who were selected by a big data-derived recruitment algorithm?
But artist will be uninsured because data/cameras show he once inadvertently sat across a bus isle from convicted pedophile.
I'm a trained behavioral scientist who loves nothing more than wallowing in data, but some bigdata-/alorithmized-world implications unsettle.
On the other hand: As a 40-yr student DKahneman (e.g., Thinking, Fast & Slow), I'm frightfully aware of how routinely our instincts suck.
Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near sits on my bedside table, and I wish I'd wake up one morning and discover it missing.
As someone who's lived for 50 years with a religious belief in the primacy of data, it's an "Oh-shit-my-dream's-come-true" nightmare moment.
Religiously believing in the Supreme Power of Data was fine ... as long as your data sucked.
Data uber alles. There is no God but Correlation. Is the Googleplex Heaven? Or Hell?
My problem is the more I study, the less idea I have of what I think. And I know for sure that's either a good thing or a bad thing.
What is the mathematical relationship between a yottabyte and yadda yadda yadda?