Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think

“The very idea of penalizing based on propensities is nauseating. To accuse a person of some possible future behavior is to negate the very foundation of justice: that one must have done something before we can hold him accountable for it. After all, thinking bad things is not illegal, doing them is. It is a fundamental tenet of our society that individual responsibility is tied to individual choice of action. [...] Were perfect predictions possible, they would deny human volition, our ability to live our lives freely. Also, ironically, by depriving us of choice they would exculpate us from any responsibility.”

“Sometimes the constraints that we live with, and presume are the same for everything, are really only functions of the scale in which we operate.”

“The IT revolution is evident all around us, but the emphasis has mostly been on the T, the technology. It is time to recast our gaze to focus on the I, the information.”

“In God we trust—all others bring data,”

“Captcha (for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart). Five”

“there were more than 30 surveillance cameras within 200 yards of the London apartment where George Orwell wrote 1984.”

“Los datos masivos tratan del qué, no del porqué.”

“Facebook seems to catch all that information too, along with our social relationships.”

“East Germany was one of the most comprehensive surveillance states ever seen.”

“data became a raw material of business, a vital economic input, used to create a new form of economic value.”

“The ability to record information is one of the lines of demarcation between primitive and advanced societies.”

“Predictions based on correlations lie at the heart of big data.”

“The technical tools for handling data have already changed dramatically, but our methods and mindsets have been slower to adapt.”

“Amazon monitors our shopping preferences and Google our browsing habits, while Twitter knows what’s on our minds.”

“Today a third of all of Amazon’s sales are said to result from its recommendation and personalization systems.”

“Somos más sensibles de lo que pensamos a la “dictadura de los datos”; es decir, a permitir que los datos nos gobiernen de formas que pueden resultar tan dañinas como provechosas. La amenaza consiste en que nos dejemos atrapar irracionalmente por el resultado de nuestros análisis, aun cuando tengamos motivos razonables para sospechar que algo está mal. O en que nos acabemos obsesionando por la recopilación de hechos y cifras por el mero amor a los datos. O en que les atribuyamos un grado de veracidad que no merecen.”

“La propiedad de sus datos personales puede brindar a los consumidores individuales unas formas de poder que no se habían contemplado antes. Los ciudadanos pueden querer decidir por sí mismos a quién licenciar sus datos, y por cuánto.”

“Nos arriesgamos a ser víctimas de una dictadura de los datos, por la que fetichizaremos la información, el fruto de nuestros análisis, y acabaremos usándola mal. Manejados de forma responsable, los datos masivos son una herramienta útil para adoptar decisiones racionales. Empleados equivocadamente, pueden convertirse en un instrumento de poder, que algunos pueden convertir en una fuente de represión, bien simplemente frustrando a consumidores y empleados, o bien –y es peor– perjudicando a los ciudadanos.”

“Es cierto que los modernos sistemas de tecnología de la información (TI) ciertamente han hecho posibles los datos masivos, pero, en esencia, el paso a los datos masivos es una continuación de esa antigua misión humana que es medir, registrar y analizar el mundo.”

“Si el estado basa muchas decisiones en predicciones y en el deseo de mitigar el riesgo, nuestras elecciones individuales –y, por consiguiente, nuestra libertad de acción individual– dejan de importar.”

“big data refers to things one can do at a large scale that cannot be done at a smaller one, to extract new insights or create new forms of value, in ways that change markets, organizations, the relationship between citizens and governments, and more.”

“Big data is not about trying to “teach” a computer to “think” like humans. Instead, it’s about applying math to huge quantities of data in order to infer probabilities: the”