From Wired, Robert McMillan interviews Victor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier, author of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think (and more and more and more). For advocates of “big data”, the answers to problems lie in the questions we ask online — but will evidence send us in the right direction? Evgeny Morozov on the curse of “You May Also Like”: Algorithms and “big data” are good at figuring out what we like — and that may kill creativity. The past several years have seen virtually no meaningful debate over the rapidly growing presence of big data — and unless we act quickly, the brief window of opportunity to shape the contours of data accessibility may close as well. Should we use big data to punish crimes before they're committed? Spurious correlations everywhere: Geoffrey Pullum the tragedy of big data. A CIA analyst predicts the groovy Big Data world of the future in 1962.
