Irish Examiner: Highlighting the hidden danger of big data
For an Irish national newspaper Irish Examiner, Carlo Ratti and Dirk Helbing describe a world where we are inundated with so much information it is difficult to filter out the noise and discover the joys of serendipity.
external pageThe article was published in Irish Examiner in August 2016. external pageCarlo Ratti directs the Senseable City Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dirk Helbing is Professor of Computational Social Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.
"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. Examples of this abound. Consider the familiar act of buying a book online through Amazon. Amazon has a mountain of information about all of its users – from their profiles to their search histories to the sentences they highlight in e-books – which it uses to predict what they might want to buy next. As in all forms of centralised artificial intelligence, past patterns are used to forecast future ones," authors wrote.