Big Data and the Computable Society

The following sections are included:

• Dedication
• Preface
• About the Author
• Contents

In his essay In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, the Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han [1] wonders about the “new” people who live immersed in the world of digital media and that he calls digital swarm — a community composed of anonymous individuals who only apparently share thoughts and actions, but they are often lost in counting of “Like” and cannot find effective ways to express their collective energies…

An algorithm is an ordered sequence of operations that produces a result in a finite time. Whenever we solve a problem or perform a task, we actually carry out an algorithm. The word “algorithm” is over a 1,000 years old (it actually derives from the 9th Century mathematician Muhammad ibn Mūsāal’Khwārizmī, latinized ‘Algoritmi’), but until just over 50 years ago, algorithms were the exclusive subject of mathematicians and engineers. Since the algorithms have become software programs and are executed by computers, they have assumed a special role in many areas and moments of our life and in the future they could also take the upper hand over the whole of humanity…

In the last two centuries, in a symbolic journey begun with the French Revolution and finished with the fall of the Berlin Wall, social struggles and class conflicts have played the main role in social transformations. The actions of the masses in the 19th and 20th centuries in many cases were the main generators of the progress of nations, both in the western world and in the eastern countries. In our time, at the beginning of the new millennium, it is not entirely clear who and what really determines the change and progress of societies. Despite the social battles still represent an important form of criticism toward the different powers that rule nations and express themselves through differentiated profiles, in recent years they manifest themselves in much weaker forms than in the past and are sometimes completely absent, even where they could be very useful. Their transformation factor seems to show a certain degree of difficulty even in the presence of the great problems that world society is experiencing…

An activity that some would like to alienate from themselves, while others consider among the most pleasant things in life, is shopping. Shopping is an English term (not by chance) used in many languages to identify the activity of visiting stores and shopping centers not only for buying goods but also for leisure. The online shopping has partly replaced the traditional one that consumes more time and shoes, but, according to some, it develops the production of endorphins and brings significant benefits to the mood. One of the largest and most important online markets is certainly the one made in the last 10 years by Amazon, the great American company of electronic commerce that offers books, electronic material, toys and much more, guaranteeing discounts and deliveries in a short and certain time…

Umberto Eco observed this in a brief passage from one of his lessons he gave several years ago at the Italian Institute of Human Sciences. The theme is that of the difficulty of forgetting even if explicitly intended to do so. If we want to lose the memory of a fact, a gesture, an experience or just a detail related to something that happened to us, we cannot simply erase a portion of our memory as if it were a piece of paper on which are printed pencil marks to be removed by using the eraser. The human brain is very complex and the way in which it organizes our memory is very complex too. In particular, long-term memories are saved through the brain as clusters of neurons that are prepared to fire together in the same pattern that created the original data or experience, and each element of a memory is stored in the brain area that originated it. To remove data and experiences from our brain, we must work by overlapping, not by cancellation. Only by “overwriting” our neurons and their synaptic connections (not a simple operation!) we can force them to remember new memories that replace those already present…

Hypermnesia is the abnormal increase in the ability to recall memories, the hypertrophy of memory. In simple terms, Hypermnesia is a medical word used for people who don’t forget things, who abnormally have a strong memory (hypermemory). Those who suffer from this pathology can hardly follow the advice, suggested by Umberto Eco, to forget by overlapping…

Among the modern devices, the computer since it appeared for the first time has changed more than any others its size, shape, and uses. By now it is increasingly hidden inside smart devices that no longer have the original name, but possess all the functionality of a computer. Smartphones, tablets, iPods, sensors, smart traffic lights, PlayStations, webcams, iWatches, Google glass, are all computers camouflaged as refined objects that populate our lives. Today, it is estimated that about 5 billion computers are “hidden” in the guise of these devices in the world, in 2020 they should become over 20 billion. Among the many forms that the computer can take, smartphones are the most widespread. They are objects that live with us everyday and of which many users only use their functions in a small part. Byung-Chul Han in his essay In the Swarm [1] signals the limitations of these digital devices: The smartphone is a digital device that works with a simplified input-output mode. It banishes every form of negativity: through it you are unable to think in a complex way …

Even if we want to analyze the current condition from an observation point far from fashions and contingent exaggerations, we cannot deny that the digital data sources that are available today are massive, they are everywhere and the trend is that of a more than linear increase. According to an IBM study published in 2017, around 90% of the data in the world was generated within the past 2 years and trends say that from now every year the size of data doubles. IDC predicted that the Big Data and business analytics market would increase from $130.1 billion this year to more than $203 billion in 2020. Dan Vesset, group vice president, analytics and information management declared that…

The future is our greatest enigma, the perpetual arcane that stubbornly presents itself in front of us and which we would all like to unveil, to know it to govern time. Someone seeks it in coffee grounds, fortune-tellers and business consultants guarantee it everyday, others, much more seriously, “prepare” it through science, its studies and its discoveries. All possible approaches to the future represent different points of view that, despite their enormous variety, reveal human restlessness in the face of the uncertainty that awaits us everyday…

Google, together with other big web companies, apparently offers for free many very useful services: information search on the network, huge and efficient e-mailboxes, maps of the world, translators in almost all languages, videos on YouTube, and many other beneficial things that billions of people use everyday. Free services like those we can also have from Facebook, Yahoo!, Twitter, Skype, Microsoft, Instagram, Dropbox, and many other providers of information, tools, apps, and other digital services delivered instantly over the internet. A sort of land of plenty is the cyberspace, a country of digital toys. An internet connection is enough to have the enormous universe of the digital facilities at our disposal without spending a single penny. All or almost we use those services without asking why they appear to be free, why these computer giants offer us all this digital paradise…

Every time we arrive at a supermarket counter, the cashier asks us if we have the card. The cashier’s question does not help her/him to know if we are registered with a political party or a book club. Obviously she/he is interested in knowing if we are customers of that store to record on our loyalty card the products we are buying. The loyalty card counts the points that will allow us have gifts at the end of the promotional campaign. Many of us have one, but there are those who are used to shopping in different supermarkets and have several loyalty cards in their wallet. The fidelity card is associated with the complete list of products we buy including information on their cost, time of purchase, in which store we purchased them, how much we spent, etc. The supermarket records all this information and stores it in its database. But supermarkets do not just store our purchase data, they use them to target us with personalized vouchers and offers, and, very often, they use them to find out about our information that sometimes even ourselves, paradoxically, do not know. For example, they know about that bottle of wine we bought at 1:20 pm on the first Saturday of May in the past year, or when we changed our brand of shampoo…

One of many noteworthy results of the research activities in the field of AI that were produced in the early years of the new millennium was the validation of the ontological evidence of Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109 AD), also called Anselm of Aosta, made by Paul Oppenheimer and Edward Zalta. For this purpose, the two American researchers used PROVER9, a software system developed by William McCune that implements an automatic theorem demonstrator…

You do not know them, but they know you — this trivial sentence, in Hitchcockian style, explains very well the concept that the then president of the American Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Edith Ramirez, expressed during the presentation of the report on data brokers in the US [1]. Representatives of this business community are now numerous and have collected billions of files with personal information on US and foreign citizens. Information on their purchases, their families, their income, travels, work, lifestyle, health, and much more. One of the many data brokers mentioned in the report has billions of information records in its database on online transactions made by consumers. Another, Acxiom, declared that in its data center it has information about 10% of the world’s population, just under 800 million people, with about 1,500 information records for each individual…

The texts, documents, images, numbers, movies, and other digital data encoded in the most different forms, can never be read and analyzed by humans either in their entirety or in aggregated portions. Only complex software programs will be able to show us the important and useful parts contained in them. Web pages, Facebook posts, tweets, photos, Youtube videos, corporate databases, eBooks, emails, data from telescopes or particle accelerators, news and pages of digital newspapers are just a few examples of the elements of the Big Data tsunami that can and has flooded the internet and threatens to overwhelm our lives. Data sometimes contain information that is very useful to us and that we do not know how to find or use. Google often helps us to find what we need, but even the best search engine invented by Sergei Brin and Larry Page sometimes cannot find them, although people mistakenly believe that the Google search engine can find everything…

Another great issue that digital media have posed to the society of the new millennium concerns the labor world and its transformations. The work forms and processes in the digital world are among the aspects of the people life that are undergoing and that will undergo the most intensive transformations. Byung-Chul Han wrote…

While almost everyone believes that private companies are the unique “engines” of the expansion of innovative processes, in recent years significant contributions have been published about the strategic role of governments and public funding in the most advanced economies as a fundamental driver behind the development of new technologies. A notable stimulus to this thesis came in particular from the analysis of Mariana Mazzucato, an economics scholar of innovation of Italian origin, who grew up and trained in the United States. Currently, Mazzucato is a professor at the University College London and in 2013 he published the book The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths [1]…

Contrary to what one might think, this fragment is not taken from a speech by the director of the National Security Agency (NSA), but from a short story that Italo Calvino, the well-known Italian writer, wrote in the mid-60s and for which the writer of the Cosmicomics has chosen a title that would certainly like the head of the NSA: The World Memory. An almost forgotten story that the author included in the Cosmicomics book [1], published in its first edition in 1965 in Italy and from then translated in several languages. That book collects, together with this prophetic story, 20 Calvinian cosmicomics that introduce a new way of combining hard science themes with the mythic and literary, therefore, resulting in a series of exquisitely crafted tales. Each story is prefaced with a quote, detailing the scientific concept central to this particular story. But outside of the core concept, Calvino departs from scientific accuracy, allowing the story to play out with a mythic or fairy tale quality that describes new issues related to science and society…

The relationships between new technologies and politics are much more complex than it seems to be of interest to both the world of politics and that of information technology. Research and technological innovation increasingly play a main role in social transformation, not only concerning the organization of society, but also the transformations generated in customs, in culture, and in personal and mass relationships. New technologies for their ability to transform the world got a more and more important political role…

The control of radio and television broadcasting has been a notable way for influencing and building collective opinions in the last 60 years. The cases to be cited are very numerous and concern both Western nations with advanced democracy, and those governed by dictatorial governments and those with spaces of freedom limited by archaic or theocratic forms of government. Of all popular media, television shows the power of mass communication not only to inform and educate but also to influence the public both in Western countries like USA and UK and in different nations like Russia and China. TV owners often say television is just for entertainment, however, many cases occurred where television transmitted negative values, stimulated consumerism, and a naive approach in daily life…

The digital network is able to potentially put everyone in communication yet it is often an egoistic network. As we discussed before, the dialogic potential seems to be lost in interactions without composing a We capable of affecting social reality. On the contrary, sometimes the continuous and fast digital outburst seems to absorb political criticism and social conflict and therefore attenuates the protest that once was expressed in classic and more incisive forms…

The past two decades have been dominated by the emergence of increasingly powerful and less expensive ubiquitous computing, as well as the large use of the web and mobile technologies. Due to such advances in information technology and distributed computing, digital data volumes are growing exponentially in many fields of human activities. This phenomenon concerns scientific disciplines as well as industry and commerce. Such technological development has also generated a whole new set of challenges: the world is drowning in a huge quantity of data, which is still growing very rapidly both in the volume and complexity…

When Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University in 2004 launched “The Facebook” with his college roommate Eduardo Saverin, certainly has not thought of having to use it to apologize to its many users (at the moment it seems they are little more than two billion!)…

We are used to believing that the stages of renewal in our lives can coincide with the official deadlines: the New Year, the beginning of summer, next month. Yet the change of the calendar to the wall is not enough to ensure that the month or year is really “new”. On the contrary, are the changes in the modes of thinking and acting that bring real changes in our life immersed in a very complex reality and forced to multiform and continuous solicitations…

In January 2018, Amazon granted a patent for a wristband system that can track where warehouse employees are placing their hands and use vibrations to nudge them in a different direction or position. This and other few patents deal with bracelets that could emit ultrasonic sound pulses or radio transmissions to let a receiver system get a fix on where the workers’ hands are, in relation to an array of inventory bins. The system’s sensors triangulate on the wristband’s signals to determine where a worker’s hand is positioned, and software matches that position with the inventory item that’s supposed to be handled…

David Foster Wallace was an American writer and a university instructor who unfortunately died prematurely. He wrote famous novels like Infinite Jest and The Pale King. In 2015, he was regarded as “one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years”. Wallace didn’t like to give public speeches, thus in 2005 he tried to refuse the invitation to pronounce the Commencement speech at Kenyon College in Ohio on May 21. However, after several insistences, he accepted, and he did well because of that occasion remains a beautiful speech titled “This is Water” that is well preserved in the memory of many people…

The impact of the internet on the world is total and its spread has happened very quickly, perhaps too quickly. In a few decades, it has spread from a few USA universities and research centers to reach the smallest villages of all the nations in the world. Its pervasive nature has made it available to virtually everyone, in a sort of digital world democracy. The benefits have been enormous, but together with them the network has brought with it problems and distorted uses…

The very rapid advances in science and technology in recent years pose to humans the big question of how to be able to maintain control over the future, how to govern the evolution of the world, how to manage what will happen to humankind as an effect of the changes produced by computer science, genetic engineering, robotics, nanotechnology, and other exponential technologies…

Tristan da Cunha is the main island of a remote group of volcanic islands in the South Atlantic Ocean. It is the most remote inhabited island in the world, 2,400 km from South Africa, the nearest continental land, and 3,360 km away from South America. Tristan has an average diameter of 12 km and a circumference of about 40 km. In this little space created and dominated by a volcano, 288 people currently live, including about 40 visitors. Since the Tristan Island does not have an airport, visitors and inhabitants can travel by ships. Journeys take 6 days from Cape Town. The world’s most isolated community regards the arrival of every ship to the island as a special occasion…

The faint and soft glowing light that precedes the dawn when the sun is below the horizon and that one following the sunset have the same name: twilight. This ambivalent term can be used to denote both the moment in which the darkness starts to disappear, and the one in which it starts to take over on the last light of the day. Thanks to digital technologies, we are experiencing a historic moment in which the light of the old world, after losing its strength, is declining and a new light is announcing with colors still soft but that soon they will become very intense and will irradiate a different world from yesterday’s…

The following section is included:

• Index