Why Data Is the New Coal (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report on The Guardian: "Is data the new oil?" asked proponents of big data back in 2012 in Forbes magazine. By 2016, and the rise of big data's turbo-powered cousin deep learning, we had become more certain: "Data is the new oil," stated Fortune. Amazon's Neil Lawrence has a slightly different analogy: Data, he says, is coal. Not coal today, though, but coal in the early days of the 18th century, when Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine. A Devonian ironmonger, Newcomen built his device to pump water out of the south west's prolific tin mines. The problem, as Lawrence told the Re-Work conference on Deep Learning in London, was that the pump was rather more useful to those who had a lot of coal than those who didn't: it was good, but not good enough to buy coal in to run it. That was so true that the first of Newcomen's steam engines wasn't built in a tin mine, but in coal works near Dudley. So why is data coal? The problem is similar: there are a lot of Newcomens in the world of deep learning. Startups like London's Magic Pony and SwiftKey are coming up with revolutionary new ways to train machines to do impressive feats of cognition, from reconstructing facial data from grainy images to learning the writing style of an individual user to better predict which word they are going to type in a sentence.

Comments

Dear article writer: Listen to yourself

[nitehawk214]

"Data is coal, not oil."

You sound like a moron.

Sometimes things do not fit into your analogies. No matter how hard you try to force it.

Data is the new beer.

[SolemnLord]

It goes down smooth and tastes great but if you get more than you can handle you end up driving your car through a house.

Typical near-top-of-bubble stuff

[ErichTheRed]

Just like the dotcom bubble, there are entire companies whose fate hinges on massive uptake of the "big data" and "deep learning" revolutions. And just like the hype cycles from the last bubble, there's some truth to them but people really take it to an extreme to get headlines and clicks. I think when the bubble pops, there will be plenty of "real" big data problems for serious qualified people to solve, as well as legions of unemployed "data scientists" and "cognitive champions."

I think applying data analysis techniques to societal problems (emergency response, environmental issues, etc.) is a good thing. I don't think the current focus of ever more intrusive advertising and behavior analysis is going to add much value in the long run. This isn't a tinfoil-hat style rejection of tracking, it's my belief that even the dumbest of consumers are going to reach a point where they can't stand having ads shoved in their face anymore and demand that it stop. Ever notice how commerce sites email you when you put an item in your cart, then don't buy it? Lots of sites have at least buried a setting somewhere in their account configs that let people turn this off. No one ever went broke overestimating the stupidity of the average consumer, but pushing things on every channel (phone, computer, tablet, streaming ads, browser ads, etc.) will lead to consumer fatigue.