Cogito ergo sum to Data ergo sum!

‘I think therefore I exist’ was a philosophical proposition put forward by Rene Descartes way back in the 17th century. This proposition, held us in good stead for centuries to follow. However ‘cogito ergo sum’ is now hijacked by ‘data ergo sum’ in the 21st century.

Well if it has all been Greek and Latin to you so far, I can assure you it was only Latin but the new developments in the world around us are Greek to me.

The concept of Big Data is everywhere. You and I have become a data and there are people out there or rather number crunchers who do not ‘think’ but look into our pattern of behaviour, the number of times we visited a supermarket the stuff we picked. We are reduced to a byte in the realms of Exabyte and petabytes of data they end up analysing. (Just to give you an idea of the magnitude, 1 Petabyte = a Quadrillion bytes). This is huge for a person like me, whose knowledge is limited to 1024 bytes (binary) = I KB (binary) and by the way don’t ask me how many zeroes are there in a quadrillion.

Apparently this is called Data mining, in short, your visit to the supermarket was a raw material, and the minute you picked up your product you become a ‘data’ and off, you are shunted to the ‘warehouse’ where you will be ‘analysed’ and be a guinea pig among the hordes of data they are analysing. If you are fortunate enough, you end up sharing celestial space with your co-celestial ‘data’ up in a cloud. That’s probably your only silver lining! The irony is that, as a small man who visited a supermarket to pick up your day to day essentials you have now ended up being a part of Big Data!

Believe me they haunt you virtually. Your search for a low cost flight could haunt you with pop ups each time you open up a website and make you feel sick of yourself for not having waited for these pop ups, in short you were dumb to make a decision without analysing your past trend of flight bookings. Or, a search for a holiday home tucked in a serene hill station could end up being a pop up every time you log on, retargeting you and reminding you that this is your last chance to pick it up. Blame it on the big brother who is on your trails of big data.

A friend of mine recently mentioned to me about a Big Data experiment carried out by Walmart, the Beer & Diaper experiment. Positioning the beer next to the diapers apparently increased the sale of Beer on a Friday evening. It was data mined (determined) that a recent dad will be on house arrest on a Friday evening missing those pre parental pub nights, while shopping for diapers, would reach out to the conveniently positioned beer to keep him company over the weekend. This was the so called result of ‘big data’ analysis. I beg to differ here; I believe this was a result of Mendeleev’s conditioned reflex experiment. A guy who sees diapers and beer next to each other is conditioned to choose the two things that he can correlate with the most. You know very well what can link them both as a result of conditioned reflex!

The stomach feeling, the gut feeling, an intuition are all the stuff I swear and base my decisions on, be it professional, or personal. Unfortunately these feelings or methods of decision making are passé these days. Statistics is what counts. Data reflects your future. There were days when vital statistics could turn you on; today vital statistics can turn you in.

Decision making in the world around us, is reduced to a number crunching exercise where the e-quotient in any decision is extinct. The mathematical or statistical patterns, the trends, the frequencies, the behaviours, rules over the gut / stomach feeling.

Hoping and praying they don’t end up analysing the pattern of the intestinal layout at the time of decision making to arrive at a trend on our gut/stomach feeling. The end result of a ‘butterflies in your stomach’ feeling could be analysed by the number of butterflies and their flight patterns in the coming years.

Scary??? Certainly Yes !!! Leave your foot prints in time but take care to erase your digital ones.