Slashdot Mirror
The Data-Driven Life
theodp recommends a somewhat long and rambling article by Wired's Gary Wolf, writing in the NY Times Magazine, on recording and mining data about your personal life. "In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The imposition on oneself of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. And until a few years ago, it would have been pointless to seek self-knowledge through numbers. But now, technology can analyze every quotidian thing that happened to you today. 'Four things changed,' explains Wolf. 'First, electronic sensors got smaller and better. Second, people started carrying powerful computing devices, typically disguised as mobile phones. Third, social media made it seem normal to share everything. And fourth, we began to get an inkling of the rise of a global superintelligence known as the cloud.' And the next thing you know, exercise, sex, food, mood, location, alertness, productivity, even spiritual well-being are being tracked and measured, shared and displayed."
I see it as a rise of the Many-to-Many relationship.
Amazon suggestions, Netflix movies. Facebook.
The many-to-many relationship, long overlooked in database construction because of the complexities it brings with it, has now come onto it's own and is changing our lives.
"Superintelligence" known as the cloud?
There's not even any need to read such tripe. In fact, I hate everyone who read that story after seeing the word "superintelligence" linked with "cloud."
There is no bound to the contempt writers of pieces like this should be shown, nor to all of the idiots who were involved in reposting it here.
How about pretentious writing about the future. Is anyone tracking that?
Funny story. The Pythagoreans in fact believed(religiously) that all numbers were in fact rational; that is very number can be expressed as a/b, where a and b are integers. When a mathematician called Hippasus proved (using the Pythagorean theorem) that the square root of 2 was irrational, the Pythagorean were so offended, they killed him.
Having digressed, I will return to the topic at hand by saying that most people often for get that just because you can do something, that doesn't mean that you should. Just because we now have the technology to tag, monitor, follow and record everyone at all times, it is not necessarily going to be good for anyone if we do so.
This and many similar suggestions are based on what Edmund Burke--writing in the wake of the French Revolution--called "levelling reason". Without some kind of grounding; without a philosophical or moral compass, people and societies can lose their way particularly when enabled by new technologies. Ridiculous ideas and notions, contrary to all prior reason, are lauded as rational, neccessary and beneficial developments and will indeed may appear as such especially to those devoid of any real education or philosophical grounding. Unfortunately, this group now encompasses the majority of those entrusted with making decisions in society, as well as their backers. No one listens to calm thinkers anymore; everyone just listens to PR men.
We are turning into the society Burke feared. One dominated by emotive, shallow views which applies naive levelling reason to all problems it encounters. This is why our prisons are filling up as crime goes down; why our internet is being censored even as our society becomes more tolerant; why our politics becomes more polarised even as our political parties become more homogeneous. And it is why we seek to gather vast, unprecedented amounts of data about ourselves without bothering to really try and use it, or to consider the consequences of doing so.
For most stories like this, despite the modern age and technologies involved, ninety percent of these--usually negative--consequences can be discovered by a simple reading of Aesop's Fables. Not that anyone--particularly the people who report them--will bother to. As a society, uur reasoning remains at a primary school level and rationality is something we can only apply to numbers, not ourselves.
May the Maths Be with you!