Philosophy of Big Data: Big Data, the Individual, and Society

January 24, 2013Microsoft, Mountain View CASlides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga

Melanie Swanm@melanieswan.com

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Technology Evolution

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Data

Big Data!

Big Data

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Biggest hope?

Biggest fear?

What is it?

Heaven or Hell?

“Hi! I'm a Googlebot! I'm indexing your

apartment.”

Physical world analog to robots.txt ?

http://www.ftrain.com/robot_exclusion_protocol.html

Annual data creation in zettabytes (10007 bytes) 90% of the world’s data created in the last 2 years

Defining Trend of Current Era: Big Data

Source: Mary Meeker, Internet Trends, http://www.kpcb.com/insights/2013-internet-trendshttp://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/healthcare-leveraging-big-data-paper.pdf

2 year doubling cycle

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Big Data Composition

• Massive amounts of data generated daily which cannot be processed with conventional data analysis tools (volume, velocity, variety)– Impossible to store all generated data, 90% real-time

surgical video feeds discarded

• Scientific, governmental, corporate, and personal– Each generating exabytes/year– 1990s data management challenge solution: low-cost

storage, massively parallel processing, data warehouses

7http://www.dbta.com/Editorial/Think-About-It/What-is-Big-Data-A-Market-Overview-82509.aspx

Typical Big Data Problems

• Perform sentiment analysis on 12 terabytes of daily Tweets

• Predict power consumption from 350 billion annual meter readings

• Identify potential fraud in a business’s 5 million daily transactions

8http://www.dbta.com/Editorial/Think-About-It/What-is-Big-Data-A-Market-Overview-82509.aspx

Wireless Internet-of-Things (IOT)

Source: Swan, M. Sensor Mania! The Internet of Things, Objective Metrics, and the Quantified Self 2.0. J Sens Actuator Netw (2012) 1(3), 217-253.

Image credit: Cisco

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12 bn Internet-connected Devices 2016

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/growth-in-the-internet-of-things-2013-10?IR=T1Vinge, V. Who’s Afraid of First Movers? The Singularity Summit 2012

3 year doubling cycle

Usual computing gadgetry (e.g.; smartphones) and everyday objects: cars, food, clothing, appliances, buildings, roads

Embedded chips in 5% of human-constructed objects (2012)1

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Personal Information Streams

Swan, M. Health 2050: The Realization of Personalized Medicine through Crowdsourcing, the Quantified Self, and the Participatory Biocitizen. J Pers Med 2012, 2(3), 93-118.

Genome: SNP mutations Structural variationEpigenetics

Microbiome

Transcriptome

Environmentome

Metabolome

Diseasome

Proteome

Personal and Family Health History

Prescription History

Lab Tests: History and Current

Demographic Data

Self-reported data: health, exercise, food, mood journals, etc.

Biosensor Data Objective Metrics

Quantified Self Device Data

Mobile App Data

Quantified SelfTraditional‘Omics’

Standardized Questionnaires

Legend: Consumer-available

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Personal Robotics

Smart Car

Smart Home

Environmental Sensors

Internet-of-Things

Community Data

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• Sense of ourselves as information generators in constant dialogue with the pervasive information climate

The TechnoBioCitizen

Swan, M. The Quantified Self: Fundamental Disruption in Big Data Science and Biological Discovery. Big Data June 2013, 1(2): 85-99.

What are Big Data Scientists Saying?• Jim Harris, Data Science Consultant: beware of

big data fundamentalism; need for data philosophers

• Evelyn Rupert, Goldsmith’s London, Economies and Ecologies of Big Data: (dangerous) normative relation to data ; no reality, just representation; data is performative

• Grady Booch, IBM Chief Scientist: human and ethical aspects, tremendous social benefits, full life-cycle of data, ineffective legal controls

• James Kobielus, IBM Big Data Evangelist: no ‘single version of the truth’; be critical of beautiful data visualizations and data-driven narrative stories 13

Big Data

What other kinds of things is Big Data like?

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Big Data: Profound Unknown

• Profound, overwhelming, intangible unknown

• Approaches: how do we deal with something that is unknown?

• Other vast unknowns– Exploring the ‘new’ world– Space– God/spiritual realm– Disease cure– National debt– Large-project completion

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Sublime vs. Uncanny

• Sublime: loftiness, excellence, inspiration; sublime is the name given to what is absolutely great (Critique of Judgment (Kant, 1790))

• Uncanny: beyond normal/expected; plays on fears (The Uncanny (Sigmund Freud, 1919))

16Source: Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (Jean-Francois Lyotard, 1991)

The sublime is a crisis where we realize the inadequacy of the imagination and reason to each other (the differend); we are straining the mind at

the edges of itself and its conceptuality

Big Data: Sublime or Uncanny?

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Listening Post : Real-Time Data Responsive Environment (Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, 2001)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD36IajCz6ASource: The Sublime in Interactive Digital Installation by Tegan Bristow

Is Big Data Different?

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Are there ways in which big data is not part of the natural ongoing process of making our

world more intelligible and manageable (collect and exploit information)?

Is there something about big data which is fundamentally different than animal breeding,

the plow, eyeglasses, the airplane, computing, and the Internet?

Responses to the Big Data Unknown

• Analogy• Representation, visualization, map (issue of repticity

(representational accuracy))• Story, narrative, myth• Understand through opposition• Borders, limits

– Autoimmunity, Antifragility

• Quantitative approaches – Data quality– Statistics

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Representation: InfoViz

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Understand through Opposites

• Opposites (big data vs. small data)– Possible to have a just world without a notion

(and experience?) of injustice? A world of equality without inequality?

– Radical forgiveness of even the most unforgivable (Derrida)

• Interrelations and Dynamism– Being with one another vs. alterity (Heidegger)– Fúsis: rising out of itself, taking back into itself

(Heraclitus 500 BCE)– Plasticity (giving form, taking in form, exploding

form) (Malabou 2012)21

Border, Boundaries, Flexibility

• Autoimmunity (Derrida) – Autoimmunity: porous borders, possibility of self-

suicide, identity cannot be completely closed – Absolute immunity: nothing would ever happen

• Antifragilility (Taleb)– Antifragility: systems that are open to mistakes

and learn quickly; resilient and vibrant – Fragility: over-controlled systems that aim for

stability and avoid change; brittle, weak, and breakable

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Subjectivation in Modern Life

• City and subject co-create the modern sensibility

• Data and subject co-create …

23http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=244Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, 1863

For the Baudelairean flâneur, the city streets function as transitory stages of modern life.

Modern beauty is not conventional and pretty, however, but rather discontinuous,

fleeting, bizarre and strange. Differences and ruptures are its essential traits.

Immanence and Transcendence

• Immanence: everything needed for change is within the system (e.g.; ourselves, society, organism)

• Transcendence: something outside the system is needed for change

• First give voice to our underlying desires (desiring-production), our desires (biological and otherwise) as a productive force - Deleuze & Guatarri (1972)

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Living in Harmony: Relation to Others

• Hell is other people – Sartre (1944)• Desire for recognition; dependence on others for this,

ephemerality; bubble, globe, foam - Sloterdijk (2011)• Modes of existence – LaTour (2013), Souriau• Modes of experience, equality techniques - Rancière (2010)• Group ethics: an honest negotiation between individual

desires (not repression) - Deleuze & Guatarri (1972)

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Relation of Individual and Society

• Theme: government surveillance and diminution of liberty (NSA 2.0)

• Scary/not-scary threshold: anonymous census (no), internment camps (yes)

• Brin: souveillance (crowd) response to surveillance (government)

• Foucault: biopower (top-down) vs. (the more pernicious) self-disciplinary power (bottom-up)

• Deleuze: rid ourselves of self-imposed microfascisms

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Is this image of something real? What kind of real? Real life? Artificial Life? Synthetic Biology? Computer-

generated image?

What is Real?

Proliferation in reality categories

We are in a world that is fundamentally changing

Wholly new relation to Information– Formerly everything signal, now 99% noise

– Exception, variability, probability, patterns, prediction– New kinds of information

• Longitudinal baseline measures, normal deviation patterns, contingency adjustments, anomaly, emergence

• Multiple data analysis paradigms: time, frequency, episode, cycle

• New kinds of models (supplementing the scientific method)– Machine learning, hierarchical representation, neural

networks, information visualization

Source: Swan, M. The Quantified Self. Big Data (2013) 1(2): 85-99.

A New World of Futurity

• Shifting from focus on the past (known) and the present (measurable) to the future (predictable)

• Increasing importance of math and heuristics– Statistics: mode, mean, variance, outliers– Probability: quantum mechanics, semiconductors,

nanomaterials, financial markets, disease risk, preventive medicine

• Systemic, dynamic, episodic, chaotic worldviews• Collaboration especially drawing upon

crowdsourced communities

29Source: Kido, Swan, et al. Systematic evaluation of personal genome services. Nature: Journal of Human Genetics (2013) 58, 734–741.

Crowdsourced Creativity

Source: Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir 3, 'Water Night' (2012), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3rRaL-Czxw

Summary: Science and Society

• New era of scientific discovery with a greatly expanded range of possibilities due to big data, computation, and crowd participation

• Our attunement to technology as an enabng background helps us see the possibilities for the true meaningfulness of our being - Heideg

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• Big Data as a profound, intangible, pervasive feature of life requiring novel representation

• Big Data as the inspiration for a new formation and sensibility of ourselves as TechnoBiocitizens in a collaborative society

• Philosophy of big data: centrally about our relation to technology

Summary

Our attunement to technology as an enabling background helps us see the possibilities for the true

meaningfulness of our being - Heidegger

Source: Heidegger, M. The Question Concerning Technology (1954)

Technology Futures Institute

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http://melanieswan.com/TFI.html

Technology Futures Institute• Mission: use philosophy to improve the rigor of our thinking about

science and technology • Sample Projects

– Ethics of Perception in Nanocognition – Perception is a feature (Glass, electronic contacts, nanorobotic cognitive aids), not an evolutionary given, therefore how do we want to perceive

– Digital Art and Philosophy – Integration of science/technology, aesthetics, and meaning-making in complex human endeavor

– A Critical Theory of BioArt – How artists appropriating biological materials and practices to create art is or is not art

– Conceptualizing Big Data – How big data is remaking our world– Live Philosophy Workshop – Hands on concept generation

• Services– Strategic Collaborations, Research Papers, Articles – Speaking engagements, Workshops, Classes, Conferences– Philosophy Studies: Epistemology1, Subjective Experience2

331http://genomera.com/studies/knowledge-generation-through-self-experimentation2http://genomera.com/studies/subjective-experience-citizen-qualia-study

http://melanieswan.com/TFI.html

Philosophy of Big Data: Big Data, the Individual, and Society

January 24, 2013Microsoft, Mountain View CASlides: http://slideshare.net/LaBlogga

Melanie Swanm@melanieswan.comThank you !