The Rise of Big Data
Foreign Affairs (06/13) Kenneth Neil Cukier ; Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger Big data is transforming the way people experience the world and enabling them to learn things that in the past would have been impossible, offering a potential that could rival that of the Internet. This phenomenon is relatively new because as recently as 2000 only a quarter of stored information was digital, compared with today's figure of more than 98 percent. Big data does not merely refer to a quantity of information, but also the ability to turn previously unquantified information into data. This "datafication" of the world, combined with cost-effective computer memory, powerful processors, smart algorithms, and improved software, is driving efforts to provide enough data to a computer to enable it to infer the probability of an event, which is taking the place of trying to teach a computer to complete a task. Making use of big data requires three major shifts in approach to data. First,