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Primacy Of Data

General

Why is data the most important technology class?

There are 5 main classes of technology: 1) data 2) energy 3) machines 4) materials 5) biotechnology. Of the five, data is as important as the other 4 classes combined.

There have been 9 Eras of Technology.

Primacy of data means each era is defined by a major invention in data.

Oral language defines the ORAL ERA dates which from 250,000 BCE-10,000 BCE .

The proto writing tokens system defines the TOKENS ERA which dates from 10,000 BCE-3500 BCE. The tokens system lasted 4000 years from 7500 BCE to 3500 BCE.

Cuneiform writing on clay tablets defines the WRITTEN ERA which dates from 3500 BCE- 700 BCE. With hand written language, history begins.

The Big Bang of technology begins with hand written language in 3500 BCE.

The plow, wheel, bronze smelting, hydraulic engineering, beginning of cities and civilizations, and the invention of wood hulled, oared, sailboats occurred in relatively quick succession.

Invention of the complete alphabet including vowels defines the ALPHABET ERA which dates from 700 BCE-476 AD. Greek and Roman culture would come to dominate the western world during this time.

Invention of the Hindu-Arabic number system defines the NUMBERS ERA which dates from 476 AD-1450 AD. The Golden Age of Islam and the Golden Age of China were flowering of the East. In the West, the Dark Ages prevailed.

Invention of the mechanical printing press on paper with movable type defines the PRINT ERA which dates from 1450-1837. Although invented in China earlier, western popularization of printing led to the Big Surge of inventions.

The printing press accelerated the Renaissance, created the Reformation, and led to the Scientific Revolution.

The telegraph, the telephone and electricity through copper wires defines the WIRED ERA which dates from 1837-1920.

Radio wave technology defines the WIRELESS ERA which dates from 1920-1989. Radio wave technology created radio, television, and later cellular phones.

World Wide Web, big data, and smart phones define the INTERNET ERA which dates from 1989 to present.

Each era is progressively shorter in time duration yet is associated with increased numbers of inventions/decade. Technology is accelerating with the passage of time. (see second Blog, “Technology Quantified”).

The Big Bang of Technology

My blog, “Why Are Inventions Uneven By Time?”, discusses the explosion of inventions (Big Bang of Technology) associated with the invention of written language on clay tablets in Sumer, Mesopotamia. Later, the same blog is discusses the related Big Surge of Technology which occurred primarily in western Europe with the invention of the printing press. Both written language and the printing press are data inventions. Of the top 7 greatest inventions of all time, 4 are data inventions: written language (2), printing press (3), radio wave technology (6), and computers (7). Oral language could arguably be considered on the list of greatest inventions but the origins of spoken language predate the dawn of Homo sapiens in 250,000 BCE.

With data inventions we see the greatest watershed moments in human existence.

The Big Bang of Technology occurred in 3500 BCE with the invention of hand written language. Associated with the Big Bang is the near simultaneous non data inventions of the plow, the wheel and axle, the oared wooden hulled sailboat, smelting of bronze in Sumer, Mesopotamia. The first civilization to develop was Sumer, Mesopotamia on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in about 3500 BCE.  Within three hundred years, 6 independent civilizations developed in the Indus river 3300 BCE, in Egypt on the Nile river 3200 BCE, Newgrange Ireland 3200 BCE, Greece 3200 BCE, Peru 3200 BCE, Iran 3200 BCE.   Later by 2600 BCE, civilizations in China and Mesoamerica would appear. Explosions of inventions and civilizations occurred around 3500 BCE.

The Big Surge of Technology

The invention of hand written language began data storage. Also with written language came an explosion of inventions, the beginnings of history, civilization, and the birth of cities. Printed material is written language produced by machine. Printing creates more data, denser data at far less cost than with hand written documents. Better, faster, cheaper data was the result of mechanical printing. The Big Surge of Technology occurred with the invention of the printing press on paper with movable type. The printing press produced an acceleration of the Renaissance, ending the Dark Ages and initiating the Reformation and Scientific Revolution leading to the Enlightenment.

Within 100 years, thousands of printing presses were active in Europe producing millions of books and publications.

The surge of inventions which started in 1450 with the Renaissance has continued to accelerate and gain momentum up to the present day. The Big Surge has gained momentum with time and other data inventions. The telegraph was the next leap in data. Electronic data transmits across great distances almost immediately. The telephone was better than the telegraph because no intermediary person was necessary to translate the spoken word. Wireless communication, particularly with video, was another leap forward in data transfer. Access to data is possible virtually anywhere. With the internet and search engines, all data systems became linked and accessible, another leap forward in data.

5 Dimensions of Data

My blog, “5 Dimensions of Data,” explains how data has grown so powerful with time. The 5 dimensions of data are: oral language, hand written language, mechanized or printed language, electronic language, and hypertext language. Unlike inventions in the other technology classes (energy, machines, materials, and biotechnology), major data inventions build on each other.

An exponential increase in data occurs transitioning from oral, spoken language to hand written language. We see another exponential increase in data transitioning from hand written language to printed data on paper. We see another exponential increase in data transitioning from printed material on paper to electronic data on a computer screen. Another exponential increase occurs with introduction of hypertext language, the internet, and networking together of computers. The Big Surge of Technology which began with the printing press in 1450 has continued to the present day due to the ongoing exponential increases in data which have occurred ever since.

Why are non data inventions less important?

No flood of inventions occurred with the control of fire in 250,000 BCE or the domestication of plants and animals in 10,0000 BCE. Data began with oral language in 250,000 BCE. 240,000 years passed before the invention of agriculture. With the inventions of cultivation with animal domestication, human culture changed from hunter-gatherer to agricultural. However, 6500 more years passed from the beginning of farming before civilizations, written history, and cities began. The wheel and axle, the plow and the sailboat were extremely important inventions but none of the three had the impact on other forms of technology as written language, the printing press, radio wave technology or the computer. Primacy of data means data inventions are more important than non data inventions generally.

What is Big Data?

Big data is the new field of technology which deals with the huge increase in information and requires special computer processing to handle. Traditional computing cannot handle big data. Special computing analytics are needed to extract usable data from the unstructured data. Big data may be the next era of technology. Others consider big data as an extension of the Internet Era of technology. One of the most obvious forms of big data is the explosion of video surveillance data in recent years. Facial recognition software and other forms of biometrics are means of handling the huge amount of information and making the information usable. Other increasing sources of data include: smart devices (internet of things), GPS information, social media, industrial equipment monitoring, and business/financial transactions. Radio frequency identification tags, sensors, and smart meters will only increase the volume of data in the near future.

The 3 V’s of big data

are: Volume, increasing amounts of data, Velocity, the speed at which data must be processed, and Variety, the increased number of sources of data. 95% of big data is unstructured data. Adding value and veracity make 5 Vs.

Applications of big data include: government, weather forecasting, business, education, international issues, health care, media, insurance, law enforcement, and internet of things. Inventions which have increased data include: photography, motion pictures, digital video cameras, magnetic audiotapes, 90% of the world’s data has been created in the last 2 years (IBM study) with 2.5 quintilian bytes of data created daily. Analog data is from paper, film,audio and video tape, vinyl. In 1993, 90% of data was analog. Digital data includes: flash drives(2%), hard discs (2.4%), CDs (6.8%), digital tape (12%), DVD/Blu-ray (22.8%), PC hard discs (44.5%). By 2002, the “Digital Age” began when over 50% of data was digital. In 2020, about 90% of data is digital, 10% analog (source: Hilbert, M & Lopez, P (2011) Science, 332 (6025) 60-65).

Religion of Dataism

Dataism is the primacy of data taken to extreme. Dataism is the philosophy created by David Brooks in the New York Times article “The Philosophy of Data”, 2013, that the world is controlled by Big Data. 

In 2018, author Yuval Noah Harari explored dataism and popularized the concept.  In Homo Deus, Harari describes dataism as a new form of religion that celebrates the growing primacy of data, particularly big data.  Humans were the best processors of data, now computers are the most sophisticated data processing systems in the universe.  Big data with machine learning looks to supersede past human dominance with big data.  How we allow Google Maps to dictate how and where we go is evidence of the trust we have in big data.  An abundance of free data allows technology to progress unhindered.  Expertise created by the use of big data merely feeds back into the system creating even more data.

Big data represents a dataism utopia or dystopia. 

In 2017, The Economist declared that data was the most valuable resource on the planet, more valuable than fossil fuels.  The Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2016-2017 highlighted the potential abuse and exploitation of big data of facebook data from 10s of millions of Facebook users. 

Michal Kosinski was a student in Warsaw, Poland.  In 2008 he went to Cambridge University to do his PhD at the Psychometrics Centre.  Kosinski began work on Facebook models led to several conclusions:  on the basis of 10 Facebook “likes”, he could evaluate a person better than a colleague.  Seventy “likes” were enough to match what a friend knows.  150 “likes” would match a parent’s knowledge of a person, and 300 “likes” on Facebook could match  their partner’s knowledge of them.  Even more knowledge of “likes” could supersede what one knows of themself (The Data That Turned the World Upside Down. MOTHERBOARD TECH  BY VICE by Hannes Gassengger and Mikael Krogerus,  Jan 28, 2017.)

In 2012, Kosinski proved that with 68 “likes” by a user, qualities such as skin color, sexual orientation, political party affiliation, intelligence, religious affiliation, alcohol and cigarette use, could be determined.