Do the data have a human face? Only in the minds of their creators. Maybe the expression just wants to highlight the positives discovery and exploitation of this new raw material, of information, have for us humans. Or not; perhaps it’s the crude interpretation that derives from the digitization process itself: that the body is just a volume of information. That relations are a complex of networks and flows; that thoughts are electrical signals. Can anyone disagree with the experts? “Why, all this is scientifically proven!”
The de-coding of human being and its daily life, which will give us unprecedented solutions and skills, has (also historically) taken a previous step: codification. The reduction of every detail into an element of information; the timing of every breath in retrievable data. And then their organisation, classification and enhancement.
The idea that by processing / analyzing information we can improve our lives seems a given, in a world that has accepted its nature as code / information; to those who have em-bodied morals and culture (if we are allowed to say so) of the bioinformatics paradigm. And the contestation that not everything is measurable is treated as a romantic interpretation, which should be left in the books of literature.
The above video (2014) presents exactly this: the wonderful, brave new world that can arise from big data. The partiality and ideology that emanate from it throughout its duration, would allow us to write a comment for every 5 minutes of the video. We keep them for next time, although relevant comments can be found on the cyborg pages, as well as elsewhere here.
Just a little note: in all the merry foolish videos we have seen, on the new Paradigm, there are always some “details” missing: their applications in labor and the military. They don’t exist (almost) at all in the examples they present to us as “free cheese”. It is always “the cure for children”, “improving lives in third-world countries” and “augmenting our potential to reach the stars”… Or do they not intend to use them there? Probably not…