Slashdot Mirror
Dataland: the Emerging Dystopia
An anonymous reader writes "Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell's novel 1984, resorted to hiding the bushes with his lover in a failed attempt to escape the government's ubiquitous surveillance. Orwell was concerned with totalitarianism and explicit thought control enforced by police action. While that is still very much an issue for many of the world's residents, here in the West there is an unsettling feeling about a more subtle form of thought manipulation, as more and more of our activities are watched, cataloged, and analyzed by more and more institutions — governments, businesses, non-profits, political parties, mostly for predictive purposes. At least we have a name for it now: 'Dataland', a term suggested by Kate Crawford of Microsoft Research, who studies the sociological effects of networking technologies. Crawford has been written up in Slashdot before. She's criticized the indiscriminate adoption of Big Data analytics on several grounds, including the loss of anonymity, erroneous conclusions from skewed datasets, and the prospect of secret discrimination."
It's not really the same. Human behaviour is not inherently random. The lottery is. If I've bought a coffee every day for the last year, it's quite likely I'll buy one tomorrow. I thought everyone knew about Bayes?
"Winston Smith . . . . . resorted to hiding the bushes with his lover "
I don't remember any bushes in that story.
You know, neither did I, so I checked and there was a new paged taped in with bushes in the story. I guess I was wrong, there were always bushes in the story.
"Using the past to predict the future" is what we usually call "learning". Even goldfish and flies to it, and it has brought us all our science and technology. Why do people exit the door at the ground floor rather than windows 5 stories up? Because past experiences has taught us that things fall down, and that falling far is harmful. Why do you type words rather than random chains of letters? Because you predict from past data that people in the future will be able to read and understand them. Even the fact that lottery numbers are impossible to predict is a prediction about the future we make based on physical understanding (which we have learnt from data from the past) coupled with data about how the lottery process works.
You probably didn't mean to make as strong a statement as what you did but you basically said the single most anti-intellectual thing is is possible to say.