Kenneth Cukier: Big Data is better data

Kenneth Cukier, the Data Editor of The Economist, recently gave a good lecture at TED Berlin, intitled Big Data is better data. I agree with him when he said that there is a lot of hype around the term, and that is very unfortunate, because big data is an extremely important tool by which society is going to advance.



"Big Data is going to transform how we live, how we work and how we think", he said. "It is going to help us manage our careers and lead lives of satisfaction and hope and happiness and health, but in the past, we've often looked at information technology and our eyes have only seen the T, the technology, the hardware, because that's what was physical. We now need to recast our gaze at the I, the information, which is less apparent, but in some ways a lot more important. Humanity can finally learn from the information that it can collect, as part of our timeless quest to understand the world and our place in it, and that's why big data is a big deal."