Michael Driscoll on the Arrival of the Data Singularity

The machines have been interacting with each other for years now, but according to Michael Driscoll, we’ve gotten to the point where they are doing so without human involvement.

Driscoll is calling this event the Data Singularity. 

From The Dataspora Blog:

In a nutshell, the Data Singularity is this: humans are being spliced out of the data-driven processes around us, and frequently we aren’t even at the terminal node of action. International cargo shipments, high-frequency stock trades, and genetic diagnoses are all made without us.

Absent humans, these data and decision loops have far less friction; they become constrained only by the costs of bandwidth, computation, and storage– all of which are dropping exponentially.

The result is an explosion of data thrown off from these machine-mediated pipelines, along with data about those flows (and data about that data, and so on). The machines all around us — our smart phones, smart cars, and fee-happy bank accounts — are talking, and increasingly we’re being left out of the conversation.

Anyone attuned to the behavior of the stock market of late is well aware that we are often watching a grown-up version of BattleBots.  I read somewhere that automated, algorithmic trading had doubled as a percentage of all US trading activity in the last decade and I’m hardly surprised.

His discussion will give you chills about what this means for us, but you will also begin to divine opportunity if you can get your mind right on the possibilities.  A fantastic read.

Source:

The Data Singularity is Here (Dataspora Blog)