Data Begat [begets] Data

I wrote a piece earlier this year "Hyperactive" about Vannevar Bush and information overload. My conclusion was that little had changed in terms of such overloading in the eighty years between his article "As We May Think" of 1945 and the present day. With each subsequent development iteration in data handling and processing, either incrementally or through radical leaps of technological progress, the quantity of data to be handled, processed and filed increases concurrently: an inversion of Parkinson's Law and an extension of Moore's Law alike. At the heart of the phenomenon though, is an incontrovertible human truth: an obsession with progress and growth for their own sake, which overrides the fundamental needs that they appear to satisfy.

Human beings are inquisitive, socially-connected entities that love and actively seek to find connections, patterns and logic in the overall gestalt soup of our existence: in making sense of our sensory overload, we create more and more data in the process of trying to understand it all. As we develop tools in order to ease the processing of our self-created data-stew, we, in so doing, create more data to add to the pot, necessitating that we develop more powerful and sophisticated tools to further assist us in our quest for understanding. There is no such thing as complete understanding - at least in the human realm - except by reduction. The old adage of "The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence..." holds true even here in the realm of data science: how much further down the road to understanding who, what and why we are; are we?

The same situation will obtain with the increasing use of AI. Forget the demons of machine domination and human subservience to some deus ex machina created by the lizard Gods of tech. The reality will be far more mundane. AI will simply be the next iteration - albeit a revolutionary one in terms of speed of uptake and deployment - in our long saga of data generation. If it is to be of any practical future use at all, it will have to guide as to where all this information is going to reside and how we actually apply it to good purpose in solving some of the more pressing, fundamental issues that face us as a species, such as climate change, famine and waste. A good example is the last link [waste], that was generated by Google AI, linking to a waste management company called WM. Unreal.

These are the big questions that we have always faced, and despite our continuing ingenuity in finding temporary solutions to immediate problems, these truly existential issues somehow always seem to get swept under the metaphorical carpet for another day and another generation to deal with. Our prevarication, favouring novelty and immediacy over the rather more prosaic and pragmatic needs to ensure our species' continuity, is a reflection of our biology, of who we are: dopamine trumps everything, and bigger, better, stronger beats stasis, continuity, and stability in the ceaseless competition for our attention. Bigger data, better data, stronger data. It doesn't seem to matter to what ultimate end  - except maybe to the cult of Mammon - we put all this stuff: we just have a need for more and more of it, despite the ultimate cost...