Interesting book with some potentially useful and some terrifying implications. The Numerati by Stephen Baker shows how human behaviour is becoming more and more quantifiable. With so much of our activity recorded as transactions, searches, navigation, etc on this interweb that everyone's talking about, it's easy to be monitored in great depth.
BusinessWeek has a an interview with the author, and their coverage of the book focuses on what could be a dangerously unethical side of this phenomenon. The article begins by saying that a very significant corporation will use mathematical models to "automate management". Automate management!? What kind of intrusiveness will the employees be subject to? And how can a complex organism be managed on the basis of complicated algorithms?
I have my reservations and even objections, but it will be interesting to see what we can learn and what we can predict based on tangible data. Done with moral consciousness, great things will surely come.
Also in this thread is Super Crunchers. It describes how people can and should leverage math. I prefer that to a description of how big brother can leverage math to commodotize tacit human knowledge.
2 comments:
It is interesting to me, and surprising to many, that our behaviours and tendencies may be more predictable than we would like. How can so many unique individuals be grouped together so conveniently by a few equations? Personally, I think that this concept should strengthen our unity as parts of humanity, rather than scare or anger us.
Interesting number-crunching side note:
Billy Beane, who's revolutionary methodology changed scouting and evaluating baseball talent forever, has sworn to bring the same approach to the American health care system.
Apparently we can break everything down to easily digestable metrics.
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