Being reluctantly dragged into a Big Data world.

Our Twentieth Century analog legal, government, financial, corporate, news and infrastructure systems are reluctantly being dragged into a digital future that is mostly incomprehensible to them. I'm no tech expert. It's incomprehensible to me too.  And digital information is expanding extremely rapidly.

2010 Digital Universe Study Title: A Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready? 

Twitter adds 2,500 megawatt hrs. of demand globally per year. Equivalent to 2,850 k households. - Science Friday

Our power grid has rapidly fallen from number 1 in the 1980s among nations. Now we are ranked in the 30s. The US power grid has not kept pace with the power demands. Most of the new power demands are from digital storage and usage.

Some people still use the analog system reading newspapers and TV for news. Unfortunately many of the analog people are government officials, such as school board members and local government officials trying to make sense of financial data.

Amish and Mennonite sects are voluntarily separate from the modern world. People that refuse to Tweet or buy a computer are involuntarily separated from the modern world. 

The amount of analogue information has stayed the same:

 "As recently as the year 2000, only a quarter of the stored information in the world was digital. The other three-quarters were on paper, film, vinyl LP records magnetic cassette tapes, and the like."  In 2013 ratio of analog to digital was 2% to 98%. 

"Meanwhile the danger to us as individuals shifts from privacy to probability ; algorithms will predict the likelihood that one will get a heart attack (and pay more for health insurance), default on a mortgage (and be denied a loan) , or commit a crime (and perhaps get arrested in advance). It leads to an ethical consideration of the role of free will verses the dictatorship of data. Should individual volition trump big data, even if statistics argue otherwise? Just as the printing press prepared the ground for laws guaranteeing free speech - which didn't exist earlier because there was so little written expression to protect-the age of big data will require new rules to safeguard the sanctity of the individual.  

In many ways, the way we control and handle data will have to change. We're entering a world of constant data-driven predictions where we may not be able to explain the reasons behind our decisions. What does it mean if a doctor cannot justify a medical intervention without asking the patient to defer to a black box, as the physician must do when relying on a big-data-driven diagnosis. Will the judicial system's standard of "probable cause" need to change to "probabilistic cause" - and if so, what are the implications of this for human freedom and dignity?"

From:
Big Data. A Revolution That Will Transform  How We Live, Work and Think
By Victor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier