Data can’t tell you where the world is headed.

Lara Lee, cited by Stephanie Clifford in Social Media Are Giving a Voice to Taste Buds via NY Times.com

In a piece about the fad flavors for corn chips and cosmetics colors is buried a bit of deep insight by Lara Lee, chief innovation and operating officer at the design consultancy Continuum, which helped design the Swiffer and the One Laptop per Child project.

Our knowledge is constrained by the fabric of the post-normal. The notion that there is a deterministic future ahead of us, rolling out like a yellow brick road, is an illusion. Next year emerges out of an opaque sea of trillions of semi-independent decisions made in the present by billions of individuals and groups, cascading into each other and impacting each other in literally unknowable ways. When systems become as complex as the modern world there are no tools that can see more than a very short distance into the future.

Yes, taste makers can concoct a spicy chip that sells well this season in southern California, or what beer will be popular in NYC for Labor Day, but we can’t predict, for example, the invention of alternatives to antibiotics in a world where bugs are growing antibiotic-resistant. There are limits to our knowledge:

Stowe Boyd,  Re: The Future Impact Of Big Data In 2020 and The Limits Of Our Knowledge

Big data is unlikely to increase the certainty about what is going to happen in anything but the nearest of near futures — in weather, politics, and buying behavior — because uncertainty and volatility grow along with the interconnectedness of human activities and institutions across the world. Big data is itself a factor in the increased interconnectedness of the world: as companies, governments, and individuals take advantage of insights gleaned from big data, we are making the world more tightly interconnected, and as a result (perhaps unintuitively) less predictable.

The New York Times

31 July 2012 18
big datataste-makingchips and dipspost-normal

Notes

  1. swelledtech reblogged this from emergentfutures
  2. oceanandpopsicle reblogged this from emergentfutures
  3. awordofvice reblogged this from themodernworld
  4. mygenerate reblogged this from emergentfutures
  5. esuertrahc reblogged this from emergentfutures
  6. designcaf reblogged this from emergentfutures
  7. themodernworld reblogged this from emergentfutures
  8. yewtreearts reblogged this from emergentfutures
  9. emergentfutures reblogged this from stoweboyd
  10. stoweboyd posted this

← Previous Post Next Post →

About

Web anthropologist, futurist, author. My focus is the future, and the tectonic forces pushing business, media, and society into an unclear and accelerating future. more.

Working on longer format projects, Sign up for the newsletter.

GigaOM Research analyst and curator.

Also writing beaconstreets.com.

Contact me. or ask me a question.



My Vizify profile.

Socialogy

  • John Hagel | John offers up some great insights, like the fact that passion is lower the larger that businesses get.

  • Euan Semple | A chat with my old pal, and the author of Organizations Don't Tweet, People Do

  • Will McInnes | The author of Culture Shock and managing director of Nixon/McInnes

  • Jennifer Magnolfi | An interview with the woman who said, 'Work is not a place you go, it's a thing you do'.

    • Hot Now

  • What Drives Us? | A draft chapter of my book, discussing motivations, Maslow's hierarchy, and fluidarity.

  • Socialogy: Interview With John Hagel | I Speak with Joh Hagel about the innovation at the edge.

  • Complex organisation arises from webs of interaction among causal factors | So, it turns out that DNA is, in fact, a great metaphor for business culture, but only after you realize that DNA is not a few hundred off-on switches, but instead a universe of unknowable complexities, that we can interact with, and understand at some abstract cartoonish level, but not control, and never fully comprehend.

  • Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy’s Last Safe Haven | Paul Ford

  • Innovators Get Better With Age | Companies make a mistake by relying too much on the innoations of the young, because Nobel laureats don't come into their prime until their 50s.

    • Oldie

  • Infodemics | 2009 | Passing incomplete or inaccurate information about some risk event can make people take actions that increase the damage of the event itself.

    • Lynx theme created by Andrew Stichbury for Tumblr.