"Big Data" is Just Repackaging Information
The owners of the biggest computers like to think about them as big artificial brains. But actually they are simply repackaging valuable information gathered from everyone else. This is what “big data” means.
For instance, a big remote Google or Microsoft computer can translate this op-ed, more or less, from English to another language, but what is really going on is that real human translators are being made anonymous, invisible, and insecure. Real translations, made by humans, are gathered in multitudes, and pattern-matched against new texts like this one. A mashup of old translations will approximate the new translation that is needed, so long as there are many old translations to serve as sources.
As long as we keep doing things the way we are, every big computer will hide a crowd of disenfranchised people. In the case of translation, the people are translators, and in the case of surgery, someday they will be surgeons.
Notes:
Information provided by other sources.
Folksonomies: information data big data
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Translation (0.956237): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Language (0.783474): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Machine translation (0.709026): dbpedia | freebase
Computer (0.635540): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc
Free information, as great as it sounds, will enslave us all