The Human Face of Big Data

Original PBS Link // YouTube link to documentary

A look into the world of big data and how its shaping almost every facet of our life now and for the future, whether we notice it or not.

• "Everything has information at its core. So if information matters, then reorganizing the entire information network of the planet is like wiring up the brain of a two year old child. Suddenly that child can talk, think, act, and behave. The world is wiring up a cerebral cortex, if you will, of billions of connected elements that are going to exchange billions of ideas billions of points of knowledge, and billions of ways of working together."
• "Our planet is beginning to develop a nervous system, with each of us acting as human sensors."
• On health:
  • "Might sound interesting, might help you shed a few pounds, might make you realize you're eating too many potato chips and sitting around too much perhaps and that's useful to you individually, but if hundreds of millions of people do that you have a big cloud of data about people's behavior that can be crawled through by pattern recognition algorithm and doctors and health policy officials can start to see patterns that change the way collectively as a society we understand not just our health but every single area where data can be applied because we start to understand how we might collectively as a culture change our culture and behavior."
  • "Everybody understands what it takes to digitize photography, a movie, a magazine, newspaper, but they haven't yet grasped what it means to digitize the medical essence of a human being. Everything about us now that is medically relevant can be captured with sensors we can digitize all of our metrics, and with imaging we can digitize our anatomy, and with sequencing of our DNA we can digitize our biology."
  • "We have 6 billion data-points sitting in our genome that we've never had access to before. We're moving to a world where the patient is at the center of things and hopefully also at the controls."