Big Data: Reconfiguring and Empowering the Human-Data Relation

A strong new presence in contemporary life is big data (the collection and use of personal data by large institutions). As individuals, we can feel powerless in our relation with data.

At present, the human-data relation is one of fear, distance, powerlessness, lack of recourse, and diminished agency. There is an asymmetry of touch in the human-data relation where data can see and touch us without our noticing or being able to touch back. What is missing from the human-data relation is the capacity for humans to touch data in a meaningful way. The asymmetry of touch leads to an incomplete subjectivation of both the human and the data: big data creates a false composite in trying to model and understand the whole individual from just a few electronically-traceable activities, while humans have almost no sight or conceptualization of the entity that is big data.

There are at least two ways to humanize and improve the human-data relation. One is reconceptualizing subjectivation and personal identity as a malleable and dynamic association of elements and capacities, and the other is reconfiguring the power relation between humans and data. To balance the power relation so that humans are more empowered, non-profit institutions, watchdog organizations, and community groups could be created for the defense of personal data, and privacy could be overhauled as a practical impossibility and recast into a system of access rights and responsibilities conferred upon the data.

Presentation: The Philosophy of Big Data
Video (in French): La reconfiguration de la relation humaine-données par le toucher

Big Data becomes Personal: Knowledge into Meaning

One of the most significant shifts in the contemporary world is the trend towards obtaining and analyzing ‘big data’ in nearly every venue of life.

However, one of the biggest outstanding challenges is turning these large volumes of impersonal quantitative data into qualitative information that can impact the quality of life of the individual in a multiplicity of areas such as happiness, well-being, goal achievement, stress reduction, and overall life satisfaction.

For this reason, I have helped to organize the AAAI Spring Symposium this week (Big data becomes personal: knowledge into meaning) at Stanford March 24-26 to explore exactly this question of turning personal data into meaning as related in Figure 1.

 

Figure 1: Turning big data into personal meaning.

AAAI 2014: Connecting Machine Learning and Human Intelligence

The AAAI Spring Symposia are a place for worldwide artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other computer scientists to present and discuss innovative theoretical research in a workshop-like environment. In 2013, some of the topics included: learning, autonomous systems, wellness, crowd computing, behavior change, and creativity.

Proposals are underway for 2014. Please indicate your opinion by voting at the poll at the top right for these potential topics:

• My data identity: personal, social, universal 
• Big data becomes personal: knowledge into meaning 
• Wearable computing and digital affect: wellness, bioidentity, and intentionality 
• Big data, wearable computing, and identity construction: knowledge becomes meaning 
• Personalized knowledge generation: identity, intentionality, action, and wellness

The uncanny guest of post-nihilism

Nietzsche delivers the message that ‘god is dead’ with a parable where a madman goes into a 19th century European marketplace with a lantern at high noon asking ‘where has god gone?’ to the atheist-filled marketplace (in The Gay Science). Whereas previously the church had provided meaning to life and an endpoint to the story (e.g.; salvation), god was now dead and the marketplace was taking the church’s place in providing value and meaning to life, and there was no endpoint to the story, just nihilism (nothingness, e.g.; life is meaningless). Nietzsche presciently predicted the arrival of nihilism as ‘Europe’s uncanny guest.’ (from remarks by Robert Harrison at the Roundtable on the topic of "Nihilism" on February 29, 2011)

One could then ask, in the figurative marketplace for the new faith, what next uncanny guest might be lurking as the successor to nihilism? Post-nihilism could be the turning back to ‘something’ from ‘nothing,’ perhaps as many subjective virtual somethings as there are and will be ‘individual’ intelligences. The inward-turning path to individual liberty, choice, and subjectivism continues to prevail as opposed to a regression toward normative objective truths. Degreed objective truth (akin to degreed belief) is merely a transport layer for convenience and social lubrication but not a content layer. Early clues of the move towards greater subjectivism can be seen in the modern economy 2.0. The marketplace continues as a literal and figurative metaphor with an important mechanism for commuting meaning being the increasing value of the new currencies: reputation, status, attention, intention, etc. supplementing and perhaps eventually superceding money and labor. The need for stories and endpoints has as much relevance as ever.

Multiworld ethics and infinitarian paralysis

In an interesting 2008 essay (The Infinitarian Challenge to Aggregative Ethics), Oxford futurist scholar Nick Bostrom considers some of the issues that may arise in multiworld ethics. The central focus is on the theme of infinitarian paralysis, that individuals may not act since they think their impact is too small to matter. This is not a new theme; a classic example is not voting thinking that one voice does not matter. However, when considered in an infinite multiworld sense where every permutation of every individual and their actions exists elsewhere, perhaps individual voices really do not matter…and individual agents in any world could experience infinitarian paralysis.

As the essay suggests, humans may be able to qualify and circumscribe the issue of infinitarian paralysis and live and act unconcernedly in the current world. While this may be possible now, as humans become more rational through augmentation, and with the potential advent of artificial intelligence and hybrid beings, the specter of infinitarian paralysis may be harder to ignore. The inherent irrationality of humans together with the skill of ubiquitous rationalization is part of the cohesion of modern society. However, in a post-scarcity economy for material goods where the more immediate exigencies of living in the current world have evaporated, and biologically-derived utility functions have been re-designed, philosophical inconsistencies could well occupy a higher level of concern for thought-driven beings.

Slacker Flatland's Meaningless Surfaces

Philosopher Ken Wilber, on his website and in his book, Boomeritis, discusses the interesting tensions and goals of the Boomer, Gen X/Slacker and Gen Y/Millennial generations. He purports that the appeals of leftist boomers for equality and consideration of all people, viewpoints, religions, etc. impassioned boomers at the time but had the legacy of flattening Gen X and Y to gray. Now, he suggests, Gen X's objective is to escape from "slacker flatland, meaningless surfaces everywhere, irony where happiness should be."

What is a Gen X'er to do? The sex and drugs Wilber uses in Boomeritis to texturize the characters' worlds don't work for everyone. Many teens turn to video games and online worlds (escapist or not?) but there must be other solutions. At the same time there is a growing sentiment that work must be meaninfgul (Daniel Pink's "A Whole New Mind," Ken Bakke's "Joy at Work," Tom Malone's "The Future of Work" and other early 2000s treatises). It's almost becoming a new human right. But the real world hasn't yet caught up with the thought stream. No wonder so many Gen X and Y'ers live at home and refuse to tune into the structured world as it exists even if the paradigm is slowly and unevenly shifting, and in fact requires their participation to evolve.

It's a challenge for everyone - how to be happy, and being responsible for being happy. And how to do and be to achieve the personhood and life we desire.