Reading Minds with Big Data
September 6, 2013
I thought it might come down to this eventually: big data being used to read people’s minds. It is only a pipe dream at the moment, but ReadWrite takes a look at the process in the article, “Dyson: Big Data Driven Thought Control Is Here.” It starts out with the doomsday prophecy that big data can anticipate human behavior, but that it could lead to the government and businesses using it to predict our actions and invade our privacy. Possible? Yes, according to science historian and author George Dyson. He is concerned that the NSA will use these measures against people under the guise of tracking terrorists.
The doomsday prophecy is not scary. Humans are unpredictable creatures, but that does not matter:
“It’s not that a machine can understand exactly what we’re thinking at any given point in time. It doesn’t have to. As Dyson explains, ‘A reasonable guess at what you are thinking is good enough.’”
Individual data is being turned into metadata, which is being pulled by big data to create an analytical profile of who you are. That is the scary part. If actions can be predicted, then thoughts are on their way to being punished. There is still that spark of unpredictability, though. Humans can change in an instant. Plus there is the technological problem. Even if thoughts can be predicted, how are they going to connect to a human head to get the “real-time” data?
Whitney Grace, September 06, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Beyond Search
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