Project Syndicate: The Hidden Danger of Big Data
"Decentralized decision-making can create synergies between human and machine intelligence through processes of natural and artificial co-evolution," Dirk Helbing and Carlo Ratti wrote in their latest piece.
external pageThe article was published in Project Syndicate in August 2016. Dirk Helbing is professor of Computational Social Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. external pageCarlo Ratti directs the Senseable City Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"The world today is awash in data. In 2015, mankind produced as much information as was created in all previous years of human civilization. Every time we send a message, make a call, or complete a transaction, we leave digital traces. We are quickly approaching what Italian writer Italo Calvino presciently called the “memory of the world”: a full digital copy of our physical universe. As the Internet expands into new realms of physical space through the Internet of Things, the price of anarchy will become a crucial metric in our society, and the temptation to eliminate it with the power of big data analytics will grow stronger," authors wrote.