On a whim, I asked the Hardware VP of my company to recommend me a book, since I saw he had a stack of books by his desk.

“What are you in the market for?” he asked. He was busier than I realized. I said “nothing in particular”. I was opening myself up to some serendipity. He handed me Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier, and off I went.

I’m surprised by how I am at the same time so adjacent to the concept of big data and so unable to describe its basic premises and implications, some being:

• Use n=all instead of a random sample of the data to identify outliers.
• Give up on exactitude and embrace the messy, the statistical, the relative.
• Give up on causation when correlation can inform action just fine.
  Ten years after the publication of this book, and especially in the age of AI research, these premises are fairly intuitive to the modern professional, but reading them renewed my perspective of the big data paradigm. It was a good book. It was comfortable, low-density reading that offered a steady drip feed of insight.

One reactionary narrative of the big data age is that computer scientist and statistician philistines are coming to displace subject matter experts by basing their decisions on data instead of experience. While the nano-nerd nonsense seems to get better results than the experts, the experts have an intimate connection with their subject matter that can only come from prolonged entanglement on an institutional level. The cutthroat big data cohort are trampling through a garden they don’t understand.

I’m sure this narrative actually has some truth to it, but I suspect it’s nothing unique to big data. Powerful new technologies are bound to shake up the value landscape of skills and knowledge. Besides, the conclusion is the same: data literacy is less and less optional as time goes on.

I love to wonder about how mankind relates to its technology, particularly how it changes our individual and collective mental faculties.

• The invention of the written word gave us a much more robust long-term memory.
• The invention of mathematics gave us a systematic way to process information.
• The printing press gave us the ability to massively reproduce information.
• The computer gave us the ability to process information without physically manipulating it.

This lineage of technology–of which Big Data was a recent development–underpins our drive to process more information, faster. We’re always seeking insight in the hopes that we might act in a way that is increasingly optimal. Our intelligence produces the technology, and the technology augments our intelligence.