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

But...

[sbrown7792]

I thought data was Oreos!?

Re:But...

[Matt.Battey]

Bacon, ya I see it but, I propose data is like the new donut. Looks great on the outside, a little empty on the inside, and once you've eaten three, you wish you hadden't.

Re:A particularly grim metaphor

[PPH]

So when Microsoft buys Twitter, that will be like a mine collapse?

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.

Re:Dear article writer: Listen to yourself

[bluefoxlucid]

The thing is big data lets you go to East Africa and use gajillions of samples to map out a statistical analysis of exactly what square meter of ground you want to tap into to get the most-likely absolute-best geothermal energy production. Rough knowledge lets you do ... about the same thing, just without taking it to planck scale.

We're not talking about the difference between a 500 gigawatt production facility and a 900 gigawatt production facility; we're talking about 500 gigawatt versus 500.1 gigawatt.

That's why Apple [datacenterknowledge.com], Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. are all building huge data centers. They want a piece of the pie of influencing & controlling because ultimately it will bring profits.

Big data makes the difference between 30%-effective advertising and 70%-effective advertising. Big energy can go outside and run a thermal scan of the ground (from an air plane, using IR cameras) and then just pick somewhere for geothermal; THAT'S HOW ADVERTISING WORKS WITHOUT BIG DATA! If you just bluntly advertise based on a survey of demographics, you get significantly less conversion. You go into a city and say, "Hmm, lots of black people here, kind of poor, thug life, ok. Put up billboards about Ciroc featuring buff black dudes in do-rags with face tattoos." With big data, instead of running online ads that say, "You're in regional Baltimore, so let's show racially-profiled ads that basically assume you're a black gang thug," they can try to pinpoint exactly what behaviors describe the recipient of a particular ad, and serve an ad that matches their interests, thus get much more conversion.

So, again, while advertisers might more than double their effectiveness by churning through piles and piles of data, all that effort gets power companies roughly zero over just taking a fly-over with thermal or sonic imaging. The most important data tool in oil prospecting is AUTOTUNE. They don't much benefit at all from big data. Neither does most other things (farming, manufacturing, music production, pharmacology, chemistry).

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.

Sure, but...

[fahrbot-bot]

After sitting through many code reviews, I can tell you it's not clean coal.

A new achievement in Slashdot's recent history

[jenningsthecat]

For the first time since I can remember, TFA was actually written more poorly than TFS. Of course, that wasn't not too hard; TFS only contained one paragraph from the article, while TFA itself went on and on and on in an a meandering, fuzzy-headed, buzz-word-filled fashion that said nothing and went nowhere. As a bonus, that 'coal' metaphor seems to have come straight from a cannabis-induced moment of "enlightenment".

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.