Can big data save lives?
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Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander. Our everyday lives generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every 24 hours, according to IBM. And 90% of the data that exists was created in just the last two years, it says. So could we be using this daily avalanche of statistics to make our lives better? Big data, as it's called, could even save lives, according to Kenneth Kukie, the data editor of The Economist magazine and co-author of the book Big Data, a revolution that will transform how we work, live and think. So what exactly, I began by asking him, is big data?
Well, there's no one single definition of big data, but a way to understand it is by its characteristics. And it basically means that we have vastly more data than we ever have before. And we have new techniques and tools by which we can learn from a large body of data things that we never could when we only had smaller amounts to extract new forms of economic value. And in a way, it turns data into a new resource, a new economic input.
So where is this data?
The data is everywhere. We're collecting more data about things that we always collected data on before. So every time we go to a website, everything we do, all of our interactions, even sometimes where our mouse scrolls over but we don't click, is being recorded. Now there's another facet to it. We're taking things that we never considered as being informational and rendering it into a data form.
What is meant by 'big data' and how much data do we produce daily?
So, for example, the way that you're sitting and other people are sitting. You don't think of that as data, but if I put sensors under your chair and measured it, I could probably create a index for you, which is almost like a fingerprint. The way that you're sitting is unique to you. And the service here could be an anti-theft device in cars. Put it into a car seat and the car will know if the unauthorized driver is driving.
So you're predicting a revolution. Who's leading this revolution? Who's using this data and how are they transforming our lives?
Well, the first company to probably think about is Google. They are really the paragon of a big data mindset company. The way that their algorithm works is that when you visit, where you click, the algorithm records and learns from. So if many, many visitors are searching for the same term and they're clicking on the eighth link on a page, the algorithm knows to lift it up. The system is constantly learning because it's watching what people are doing and adjusting based on that. But this is just good for marketeers, isn't it? Advertisers? Absolutely not. It's going to transform all aspects of society and our lives. But just think of health care. Go into a clinic and the doctor has to use his wisdom and his judgment and experience.
Many times he is completely wrong. Instead, we should take an approach whereby we are looking into a database of correlations of all of our electronic medical records, of what treatments work with what sort of people, where are adverse side effects for drugs and depending on the machine to do things that we can't do and can do it better and depending on our judgment and our creativity to do what we do very well and blend the two.
Has this happened yet?
Well, no, and one of the biggest reasons why is that the healthcare data is not either in electronic form, hadn't been because you never had the techniques to extract information from it before, or because there's actually rules protecting privacy that actively discourage the sharing of medical information. This is heinous. Future generations will be bewildered to wonder how medical service in the 21st century could have made decisions about human health without looking at the data of all of us and learning from correlations. Correlations just simply mean that we find associations or links between two things. So an example would be we might find out that everyone who takes one sort of drug and another sort of drug in combination becomes very, very drowsy.
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