Quotes About Data

In the twenty-first century our personal data is probably the most valuable resource most humans still have to offer, and we are giving it to the tech giants in exchange for email services and funny cat videos. From

In the heyday of European imperialism, conquistadors and merchants bought entire islands and countries in exchange for coloured beads. In the twenty-first century our personal data is probably the most valuable resource most humans still have to offer, and we are giving it to the tech giants in exchange for email services and funny cat videos.

1. Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms, and life is data processing. 2. Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness. 3. Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.

If we want to prevent the concentration of all wealth and power in the hands of a small elite, the key is to regulate the ownership of data.

If data becomes concentrated in too few hands, humankind will split into different species.

data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data.

Even if you don't know how to cash in on the data today, it is worth having it because it might hold the key to controlling and shaping life in the future.

But we don't have much experience in regulating the ownership of data,

The Scientific Revolution proposed a very different formula for knowledge: Knowledge = Empirical Data × Mathematics. If we want to know the answer to some question, we need to gather relevant empirical data, and then use mathematical tools to analyse the data. For

Rightly or wrongly, people might reach the same conclusions about Big Data algorithms: they have lots of hitches, but we have no better alternative.

The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

Biological knowledge multiplied by Computing power multiplied by Data equals Ability to Hack Humans.

b × c × d = ahh! Biological knowledge multiplied by Computing power multiplied by Data equals Ability to Hack Humans.

Capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralized data processing, at least in periods of accelerating changes.

The most interesting emerging religion is Dataism, which venerates neither gods nor man – it worships data.

In the long run, algorithms may learn how to compose entire tunes, playing on human emotions as if they were a piano keyboard. Using your biometric data, the algorithms could even produce personalized melodies, which you alone in the entire universe would appreciate.

Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

humans suffer from insufficient data, from faulty programming (genetic and cultural), from muddled definitions, and from the chaos of life.

Hence paradoxically, as we accumulate more data and increase our computing power, events become wilder and more unexpected.

If humankind is indeed a single data-processing system, what is its output? Dataists would say that its output will be the creation of a new and even more efficient data-processing system, called the Internet-of-All-Things. Once this mission is accomplished, Homo sapiens will vanish.

We are now creating tame humans that produce enormous amounts of data and function as very efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but these data-cows hardly maximize the human potential.

The NSA may be spying on our every word, but to judge by the repeated failures of American foreign policy, nobody in Washington knows what to do with all the data. Never in history did a government know so much about what's going on in the world – yet few empires have botched things up as clumsily as the contemporary United States. It's like a poker player who knows what cards his opponents hold, yet somehow still manages to lose round after round.

This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

Teachers allowed themselves to focus on shoving data while encouraging pupils 'to think for themselves'. Due to their fear of authoritarianism, liberal schools had a particular horror of grand narratives. They assumed that as long as we give students lots of data and a modicum of freedom, the students will create their own picture of the world