Having a Masters degree in Big Data I always like to read about news, views and developments around the subject. I recently read the following article (https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uta-firth-facebook-google-data-garbage) and got to thinking.
While it is true to an extent that there can indeed be an over emphasis on Big Data and AI solving all our needs of the future, do we really need to now demonize the potential?
Yes there will be many GIGO situations (Garbage-in, Garbage-out) with Big Data but this is what the analytics and AI is there for to then eliminate the extremes or ‘outliers’ to make more logical sense of whats left. There will also be vast bias and potential for fake-news within data also but this should not outweigh the potential learning and truths that come from what I call natural data sets. Natural data sets are those communities of data that we unwittingly provide or could provide without knowing that we do. This data is massively more valuable over the Social Media tractability world we live in.
So my thought is simply this……
If we look to use big Data appropriately and for the right areas while adopting the right analytics and AI, we don’t have to be afraid of progress but instead embrace it. After all those massive numbers of planes falling out of the sky due to the millennium bug really hit us hard didn’t it? Or was it just good forward thinking and a shed load of hard work fixing the issue before it was an issue.
