Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier published their joint tome on big data this week, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think. Mayer-Schönberger, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford, and Cukier, the data editor of The Economist, argue that having access to vast amounts of data will soon overwhelm our natural human tendency to look for correlation and causality where there is none. In the near future, we’ll be able to rely on much larger pools of “messy” data rather than small pools of “clean” data to get more accurate answers to our questions.
BIg Data“We are taking things we never thought of as informational and rendering them in data,” Mayer-Schönberger said in a talk Wednesday at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. “Once we think of it as data, we can organize it and extract new information.”