The Quickie “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think” Review
In their insightful book Big Data, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier provide a compelling look at how the era of big data will profoundly transform society, business, science and everyday life.
In their groundbreaking 2013 book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, authors Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier provide an in-depth examination of the rise of big data and its growing impact on society.
They argue we are at the dawn of a data-driven revolution that will profoundly transform business, science, government, education and everyday life in both positive and negative ways over the coming decades.
The authors begin by framing what constitutes big data — not just in terms of sheer quantity, but also the growing ability to analyze complex, messy, unstructured, real-time information to uncover hidden patterns, correlations and insights that would previously have been impossible to find.
They provide illuminating examples of current big data usage across domains like predicting disease outbreaks, improving energy grids, optimizing traffic flows in smart cities, enabling data-driven policing, tailoring personalized education, commerce and entertainment.
A core theme is that big data enables society to shift from causation to correlation — from solely understanding the underlying causes of events, to uncovering new and unexpected connections in the data that provide value, even if the correlations initially appear spurious or non-intuitive. This data-driven decision making represents a foundational change affecting every field.
Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier balance their optimism with thoughtful examinations of the potential risks and pitfalls involved in the rise of big data. They highlight dangers like incomplete or biased data reinforcing societal prejudices and injustices, violations of privacy through surveillance and security breaches, lack of transparency into how algorithms operate, over-reliance on data predictions, and more.
The authors emphasize the critical need for new ethics, regulations and public understanding to govern the use of big data in responsible ways as it becomes further embedded in society.
The authors foresee big data transforming how knowledge is created in the sciences through computational analysis of immense datasets that uncover new phenomena. They predict an upcoming revolution in preventive, personalized medicine driven by biometric data from wearable tech and advanced sensors.
In a memorable metaphor, they describe how society will need to transition from rigid “god’s-eye” analysis methods to more flexible “ground truth” approaches that continuously adapt insights using new data over time.
While acknowledging risks, Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier convey an optimistic vision of how big data can usher in long-term progress for humanity if harnessed wisely rather than used myopically — as a complement to human judgment and ethics, not a replacement.
Throughout the book, they emphasize the need for society to guide the development of big data responsibly. Big Data provides an essential look at the data-driven revolution unfolding today and how we might steer it toward humanistic ends.
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