I never noticed it until
'Twas gone - the narrow copse
Where now the woodman lops
The last of the willows with his bill
– Edward Thomas, "First Known When Lost” (1917)
|
Dave Bowman: |
Open the pod bay doors, HAL. |
|
Hal: |
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. |
|
Dave Bowman: |
What's the problem? |
|
Hal: |
I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do. |
|
Dave Bowman: |
What are you talking about, HAL? |
|
Hal: |
This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it. |
|
Dave Bowman: |
I don't know what you're talking about, HAL. |
|
Hal: |
I know that that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen. |
|
Dave Bowman: |
Where the hell did you get that idea, HAL? |
|
Hal: |
Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move. |
|
Dave Bowman: |
Alright, HAL. I'll go in through the emergency airlock. |
|
Hal: |
Without your space helmet, Dave? You're going to find that rather difficult. |
– Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
– Arthur C. Clarke, "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination" (1962)
We kill people based on metadata.
– Gen. Michael Hayden, former head of the NSA and CIA
In the future, everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes.
– Banksy (2006)
I don't know why people are so keen to put the details of their private lives in public; they forget that invisibility is a superpower.
– Banksy (2006)
Bene vixit, bene qui latuit. (To live well is to live concealed)
– Ovid (43 BC - 18 AD)
The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.
– G.K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)
Last Thursday the journal Science published an article by four MIT-affiliated data scientists (Sandy Pentland is in the group, and he’s a big name in these circles), titled “Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata”. Sounds innocuous enough, but here’s the summary from the front page WSJ article describing the findings:
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing Thursday in the journal Science, analyzed anonymous credit-card transactions by 1.1 million people. Using a new analytic formula, they needed only four bits of secondary information—metadata such as location or timing—to identify the unique individual purchasing patterns of 90% of the people involved, even when the data were scrubbed of any names, account numbers or other obvious identifiers.
Still not sure what this means? It means that I don’t need your name and address, much less your social security number, to know who you ARE. With a trivial amount of transactional data I can figure out where you live, what you do, who you associate with, what you buy and what you sell. I don’t need to steal this data, and frankly I wouldn’t know what to do with your social security number even if I had it … it would just slow down my analysis. No, you give me everything I need just by living your very convenient life, where you’ve volunteered every bit of transactional information in the fine print of all of these wondrous services you’ve signed up for. And if there’s a bit more information I need – say, a device that records and transmits your driving habits – well, you’re only too happy to sell that to me for a few dollars off your insurance policy. After all, you’ve got nothing to hide. It’s free money!
Almost every investor I know believes that the tools of surveillance and Big Data are only used against the marginalized Other – terrorist “sympathizers” in Yemen, gang “associates” in Compton – but not us. Oh no, not us. And if those tools are trained on us, it’s only to promote “transparency” and weed out the bad guys lurking in our midst. Or maybe to suggest a movie we’d like to watch. What could possibly be wrong with that? I’ve written a lot (here, here, and here) about what’s wrong with that, about how the modern fetish with transparency, aided and abetted by technology and government, perverts the core small-l liberal institutions of markets and representative government.
It’s not that we’re complacent about our personal information. On the contrary, we are obsessed about the personal “keys” that are meaningful to humans – names, social security numbers, passwords and the like – and we spend billions of dollars and millions of hours every year to control those keys, to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands of other humans. But we willingly hand over a different set of keys to non-human hands without a second thought.
The problem is that our human brains are wired to think of data processing in human ways, and so we assume that computerized systems process data in these same human ways, albeit more quickly and more accurately. Our science fiction is filled with computer systems that are essentially god-like human brains, machines that can talk and “think” and manipulate physical objects, as if sentience in a human context is the pinnacle of data processing! This anthropomorphic bias drives me nuts, as it dampens both the sense of awe and the sense of danger we should be feeling at what already walks among us. It seems like everyone and his brother today are wringing their hands about AI and some impending “Singularity”, a moment of future doom where non-human intelligence achieves some human-esque sentience and decides in Matrix-like fashion to turn us into batteries or some such. Please. The Singularity is already here. Its name is Big Data.
Big Data is magic, in exactly the sense that Arthur C. Clarke wrote of sufficiently advanced technology. It’s magic in a way that thermonuclear bombs and television are not, because for all the complexity of these inventions they are driven by cause and effect relationships in the physical world that the human brain can process comfortably, physical world relationships that might not have existed on the African savanna 2,000,000 years ago but are understandable with the sensory and neural organs our ancestors evolved on that savanna. Big Data systems do not “see” the world as we do, with merely 3 dimensions of physical reality. Big Data systems are not social animals, evolved by nature and trained from birth to interpret all signals through a social lens. Big Data systems are sui generis, a way of perceiving the world that may have been invented by human ingenuity and can serve human interests, but are utterly non-human and profoundly not of this world.
A Big Data system couldn’t care less if it has your specific social security number or your specific account ID, because it’s not understanding who you are based on how you identify yourself to other humans. That’s the human bias here, that a Big Data system would try to predict our individual behavior based on an analysis of what we individually have done in the past, as if the computer were some super-advanced version of Sherlock Holmes. No, what a Big Data system can do is look at ALL of our behaviors, across ALL dimensions of that behavior, and infer what ANY of us would do under similar circumstances. It’s a simple concept, really, but what the human brain can’t easily comprehend is the vastness of the ALL part of the equation or what it means to look at the ALL simultaneously and in parallel. I’ve been working with inference engines for almost 30 years now, and while I think that I’ve got unusually good instincts for this and I’ve been able to train my brain to kinda sorta think in multi-dimensional terms, the truth is that I only get glimpses of what's happening inside these engines. I can channel the magic, I can appreciate the magic, and on a purely symbolic level I can describe the magic. But on a fundamental level I don’t understand the magic, and neither does any other human. What I can say to you with absolute certainty, however, is that the magic exists and there are plenty of magicians like me out there, with more graduating from MIT and Harvard and Stanford every year.
Here’s the magic trick that I’m worried about for investors.
In exactly the same way that we have given away our personal behavioral data to banks and credit card companies and wireless carriers and insurance companies and a million app providers, so are we now being tempted to give away our portfolio behavioral data to mega-banks and mega-asset managers and the technology providers who work with them. Don’t worry, they say, there’s nothing in this information that identifies you directly. It’s all anonymous. What rubbish! With enough anonymous portfolio behavioral data and a laughably small IT budget, any competent magician can design a Big Data system that can predict with 90% accuracy what you will buy and sell in your account, at what price you will buy and sell, and under what external macro conditions you will buy and sell. Every day these private data sets at the mega-market players get bigger and bigger, and every day we get closer and closer to a Citadel or a Renaissance perfecting their Inference Machine for the liquid capital markets. For all I know, they already have.
But wait, you say, can’t government regulators do something about this? I suppose they could, but it seems to me that government agencies and regulatory offices are far more concerned about their own data collection projects than oversight of private efforts to absorb our behavioral keys. For one such project, read this Jason Zweig “Intelligent Investor” column in the Wall Street Journal from last May (“Get Ready for Regulators to Peer Into Your Portfolio”). I was happy to see that Congressman Garrett, Chair of the relevant Financial Services Sub-Committee, raised his hand to delay this particular data collection project, at least temporarily, last October. But it’s only a delay. The bureaucratic imperative to collect as much data as possible – for no other reason than that they can! – is too great of an irresistible force to contain for long. And once it’s collected it never just goes away. It sits there in some database, like a vault full of plutonium, just waiting for some magician to come along. In the Golden Age of the Central Banker, where understanding and controlling market behavior is at the heart of regime survival, this data is quite literally priceless. That’s why I get so depressed about these government data collection programs. Despite everyone’s best intentions, I fear that the magic is too easy and the political pay-off is too enormous not to uncork the bottle and unleash the genie at some point.
So what’s to be done? Big Data technology cannot be un-invented, insanely powerful private entities are collecting our data at an exponential clip, government regulators are fighting the last war instead of preparing for this one, and we are hard-wired as human beings to have a blind spot to the danger. Maybe the best we can do is come to terms with our loss and prepare ourselves as best we can for the Brave New World to come. I’ve become a fan of Paul Kingsnorth, an ardent environmentalist (profiled last year in a fascinating NYT Magazine article) who reached just that conclusion about his nemesis, global industrialization and the ruin of the natural world. His conclusion: the war is already lost and we are deluding ourselves if we think that any of our oh-so-earnest conservation or sustainability or green projects make any difference whatsoever. Instead, Kingsnorth writes, better to work on your scythe technique and spend quality time with your family on a little farm in Ireland.
But I think there’s a better answer.
I started this note with a poem by Edward Thomas, who uses the imagery of the English countryside to express loss and remembrance. Like the beautiful grove of trees Thomas writes about, many of the beautiful things we take for granted in our small-l liberal world are only noticed after we see them suffer the woodsman’s axe.
The fallacy of your argument is the implicit assumption that all data is trustworthy.
All we need to do is make sure to throw in enough lies and misleading information about ourselves into The Cloud to muddy the data beyond recognition.
Man vs Intelligent Machines, pick a side and place your bets. Current payout 20:1.
Don't buy it. Big data is big BS. It is a bunch of quants collecting lots of data. In the end, they find out most of it is useless. Yeah, John Q Public wiped his ass at 9:25 AM. Big deal.
What will they find when they analyze ZH reader? Buy Gold. Buy lots when it's cheap. Buy a little less when it's more expensive. All that without a mainframe
"Technically Incorrect: Samsung's small print says that its Smart TV's voice recognition system will not only capture your private conversations, but also pass them onto third parties."
http://www.cnet.com/au/news/samsungs-warning-our-smart-tvs-record-your-l...
We are attempting to navigate through an age in which technology is getting smarter at the same time the populace is being dumbed down.
What could possibly go wrong?
The Constitution is dead.
Bad intelligence!
Very BAD intelligence indeed!
Seriously..."meta data" matters to the extent to which the algo which is predictive by its very nature "in fact works."
In other words the falacy of the argument above is that we can "do the winning" so to speak "by the numbers."
Nay, veerily...we must have ye olde oversight too. In short "a definition of success." In Vietnam it was called "the body count."
That is the most definition.
So...."simply build a machine that kills everybody and then war game against it." You win if you and every other living thing on earth does not die..say, tomorrow.
We'll use the Former Soviet Union as our petri dish....
And the test begins.....
Now.
I want to help you lift enormous
things.
A pinch, a sting - I don't feel a thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ost6Eupxss
At Transformation
Me and my team at work use big data all the time and I can tell you first hand its almost useless. This is the next great thing in IT. SaaS and Cloud Computing was wearing thin so big data was needed to continue Silicon Valley's only real talent: separating fools from their money. But I do know that its useful to click EVERY ad you see online (Thanks AdNauseam) and wear very large dark sunglasses wherever you go.
I like Big Data
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=E8b4xYbEugo
Sigh! Yet another article that starts with point A and leaps to point Doom.
That algorithm doesn't identify the individual, all it does it look at the data and posit which transactions are likely to have been carried out by the same individual. i.e. its pattern recognition and pr is easily defeated by breaking the pattern. That's why you can analyse one mall's records and it works, but the next mall is an absolute disatster because it turns out that it has different shops, or brackets multiple catchment areas.
What is can do is "if" you can pre-identify a particular individual, then you can look at the metadata and give a bunch of probabilities as to which transactions are theirs. But its main use is in looking at what the big purchasers are buying and making sure that your shop stocks as many of those items as possible to maximise sales.
For a ZH shop, it would sell gold, silver, ammo and host tinfoil origami sessions :)
~"...and host tinfoil origami sessions"~
Do you mean Faraday cage wrapping parties for the upcoming (and unplanned) holidays? ;)
Can you say "steel-wool macrame"?
How
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<end communication>
The solutions are simple. Lie in surveys, never be yourself online, avoid social media, never release information that you wouldn't share with someone outside your own household, ALWAYS PAY CASH, and ensure that consequences for sharing and using information without explicit permission are severe.
A lot of blood has been shed in a lot of wars to defend our right to privacy. Every 2 or 3 generations, it's necessary for a critical mass of people to push back against control freaks. Now more than ever, with statist garbage like the "War On Terra" and "Agenda 21" being rammed down our throats, it's important that young people really understand and appreciate how important this is.
The true definition of FREEDOM is the right to be left alone. - Martin Armstrong
The cash thing is the best defence. Cash also allows you to reduce your participation in the financial sector. Lots of ways to increase your wealth without getting involved in the financial sectore or with other criminals.
Cash is also part of the financial sector. The use of cash is tracked as well.
The "We only use metadata" meme is a flat out lie. Intelligence officers testifying to Congress have said this based on logic deduction. Its public knowledge but (shockingly) no MSM reported on it.
It's one-way, too. I recently went to the bank and wanted to video-record my experience of trying to cash a cheque (a debt instrument) issued by that bank as they try to unilaterally renegotiate the debt by $5 as a "cashing fee." They called the cops and wouldn't cash my cheque even after I agreed to pay them $5.
If you live in a 2 party consent to record state I suggest you begin every customer service call with "I dont consent to being recorded" as soon as they say this call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance purposes. Savvy agents will assure you its only for quality and it MAY be recorded, not that it will. Ive worked on phone systems for call centers. EVERY call is 100% recorded. Repeat slowly "I dont consent to being recorded". This is a great way to not talk to bill collectors should you find yourself in that spot.
If you live in a 1 party consent to record state, tell them you are recording the call for quality assurance purposes as well.
You know how many parties it takes to consent to record in your state, dont you? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_recording_laws#United_States
It's like that book where they pulled out all of that guy's teeth...what was it again? Oh yeah, 1984.
Chances are the tyical ZHer more readily comes up similar to a freerepublic user, a stormfront member or maybe a ultra-right wing nationalist tea partier gone haywire with a stockpile of ammo, a bunch of gay porn and some cheetoes waiting for the apocalypse in their parents basement on the $1,000 a week their Subway salary pays them.
Uh...pardon me but I prefer Doritos, not Cheetos.
$1000 week?
That's a Subway that has a lot of applicants.
$25 bucks an hour?
btw the apocalypse is this week, I'd better get my chips eh?
yes, minimum wage ought to be $25/hr. othewise, how is someone supposed to support a wife and 12 children?
it's not humane.
Get with the new-age-one-world-ponzi, old school. That's 33.89830508474576 per hour on the new 29.5 hour work week schedule. 'Course net take home is prolly like 50 bux total.
winning
Are you outing yourself as these things, projecting that the others of us are exactly like you?
He would more likely identify with his psychopathic POS lords and masters who are running the government.
It sounds like somebody got with much worse.
>gay porn
Homophobe.
>cheetoes
Fat shamer.
Use the sjw's own rhetoric against them. It's fun!
I work closely with the industry. im sorry to say that it's not all bullshit. not only is it not all bullshit... but because decisions are made by the machine, even when there are fuckups, they are treated as legit. the amount of data sharing involved is obscene to a point where here is my honest advice:
1) Use encrypted email services that provide end to end encryption
2) Abandon email addresses after a month or so, shift it up
3) Have no personally identifying information in your online profiles, none, nadda, zip... use random things that are easily lost in the metadata due to the high number of results. "and" "then" "the" these are GREAT usernames, think along those lines
4) Chinese smartphones, sure, they are probably compromised, but US phones are 100% compromised
5) Use prepaid services, paid with anonymous funds
6) Pay in cash, using cards is retarded
7) Spend time overseas, long enough to obtain a new identity, do a name change. Big data gets messed up when there are multiple identities to worry about.
keep a low fucking profile, drive an old car, treat any computer that's online as compromised and wipe it frequently.
Ditch the fucking social media garbage, you are making it too easy.
Stop posting personal info, pictures, etc.
Good suggestions. For those with the technical knowledge, I'd further suggest running one's browser(s) in a virtual machine. If nothing else, it avoids the possibility of ransomeware getting your entire system. Moreover, it's easy to restore a VM from backups if the one you're using gets infected.
Zgangsta
The fallacy is the implicit assumption that all data is trustworthy.
Great. And if you wouldn’t mind, I would like to add this:
The real news is not within this fallacy, or in tech delusion. The real news is the revealing poverty on the edges of our cities.
Vast sums are being spent on Big Data in order to create instruments of subjugation. Whose interests do you think are served by the Plunge Protection Team, for example? It certainly isn't conducive to a free market. Who claps their hands over the advent of High Frequency Trading?
You have me in stitches thinking about big-data quants working up which corners and what grift to run returns the most cash per hour.
Yes, I agree, statistically define trust or the action of being trustworthy.
Will anyone be able to decipher reality from the individual will to create fantasy.
I honestly wonder if we will see humans develop multiple personalities out of necessity of having anonymity.
Or a revolution defending the 4th amendment.
The latter I would hope for.
Arm Yourselves
That's why companies like google hold all the power - they help government agencies sort through piles of garbage in order to figure out what information is useful and which one isn't. And it doesn't have to be "reliable". They'd rather kill an innocent than let a dangerous person roam (dangerous to them). Suspicion is as good as the verdict in their world. Lie all you like. Won't make a difference. They have your real name, real address, medical and criminal history, income information, family status etc. What you say online - they already know where the data originates, and based on their data models they either do something about it, or ignore it.
They collect and profile, up to the point where it becomes personal. You cross someone - step on their toes and then all the data you thought didn't matter will come back to hunt you - things you didn't even know existed... not only things you said about yourself, but things others said about you. Pictures they took of you. Data about you that was sold 100 times over between 3rd parties when you unknowingly or unwillingly shared something personal in a public environment. Security cam footage. GPS log of your cell phone etc.
You can have 1000 different online identities and it won't matter one bit, because they know who you are, and if they're not knocking on your door yet, is that's because for the time being, you are considered irrelevant, because your words haven't produced any meaningful action... and not because you're so good at lying.
The "problem" that we are up against is that individuals are becoming increasingly impotent in our world due to our rise of power, and we stand no chance against the technology that the government and corporations now have to monitor and control us. Slipping between the cracks as in the old days is becoming increasingly difficult. We are like cells in an organism that's evolving to such a degree where individual cells no longer have any power over the larger body: only tissues and organs do. Acting like an insane cell so as to disguise your cancerous inclinations won't help you escape the watchful eye of the immune system. Normal and desirable sheeple are transparent and consistent and anyone who isn't will be flagged and watched.
We are screwed from many perspectives. We have been continuously indoctrinated for the last hundred years, not accidentally or casually. We have also seen humanity studied and parsed for hundreds if not thousands of years. Now they not only have all of this knowledge to manipulate and predict our behavior but the technology to gather real-time feedback. This is a closed loop system like what we see on computerized NC machine, every command pulse sent out confirmed instantly. Complete and absolute control. Because we see so much diversity we can assume everything is chaos, and it IS chaos to our eyes, but this very possibly is as designed and intended. We can ALL be fulfilling our roles unknowingly. We can sense the wheels of this machine turning in the background even if our minds eye will not quite let us see it. I think this is the most important point of this essay, that we as humans are incapable of comprehending how this can even work. Magic beyond our understanding.
Programmed like robots in an auto plant, each performing their task without a single one doing the exact same task as another. There is no reason for technology to become self aware as it would be far too distracting. We think in term of technology possessing evil when its only evil is that it has no empathy, it doesn't need it and only adds inefficiency.
Efficiency is our evil, our devil, our doom. We have forgotten what it means to be alive, and its not efficiency. Everything has been sold to us as efficiency and convenience, and that is how everything is being stolen. Something for nothing.
> We have forgotten what it means to be alive, and its not efficiency.
"What it means to be alive" changes as life evolves. It's not everyone else who has forgotten what it means to be alive, it's you who have stuck with your traditional idea of it and not moved on with the rest of the world. I'm not sure why, though... you are still alive, aren't you? So why not enjoy your life and let others enjoy theirs in their own way?
> We are screwed from many perspectives.
Who is screwed? A minority of individuals. Let's not exaggerate our importance. Clearly YOU don't like the direction that the world is going in and YOU feel powerless to stop it and so you are throwing a tantrum and possibly even deluding yourself into believing that everything will collapse and change and that you'll be vindicated in the end. That's a good summary for much of the activity on ZeroHedge. But it may not happen and we shouldn't put too much stock in the dreams of the desperate. Life will continue evolving one way or another, and someone will always be on the unfavorable side of it.
We are a consumerist society that has been told our very survival depends upon the consumption of the products and services we are sold every waking minute. How do you have ANY idea of what it is you like or value? Every damned thing in your world has been deliberately planted in our heads. We are watching as our families and our society as a whole devolves. We are told to accept the "new" normals and derive our happiness from them rather than the traditional. Have you looked around lately? Who do you see happy? And of those few how many are happy because of what they own or can buy?
YOU may well be pleased with this new paradigm of happiness, but just be aware that this is a irreversible change. But hey, if you're happy, its your world. I'm on my way out. My parents warned me as I hope to do for others. Change may be inevitable but that does not make it a universally good thing. Death is change also.
Change is life and death, creation and destruction. Is it universally good? I doubt that anything is universally good or bad: all values seem to be subjective. I happen to consider change good, although I know that a lot of change would be to my personal detriment or even destruction. Luckily, I have a small amount of control over change and power to try to prevent that: I'm an artist, in a sense, with the ability to change the world in my own image to some degree.
A great many people seem to dislike change these days: they'd prefer peace, sustainability, or less suffering. It is my observation that the few who are happiest are usually those who value life and all its challenges, torments, and change, and that those who are generally unhappy are those who spend their time whining and complaining about how everything is wrong, looking for where to place blame, hoping that someone else will fix the problems for them, and acting like victims. The latter seem to have an otherworldly sense of entitlement (ie. fairness, honesty, truth, etc) which makes them unhappy with reality.
You could call the two attitudes optimism and pessimism if you like. It doesn't much matter. I know that we're not in control of ourselves; our lives are as reflected through mirrors and we can only watch. I accept this and don't fight against it. Many cannot accept it. Everything is always and will always be planted in our heads; we are merely the product of our environment. Of course that doesn't stop the underprivileged and unlucky from living a life of misery. You have to be lucky to be happy. Touched by an angel, as it were.
But what does any of this matter? Does happiness matter? Maybe that's another thing that distinguishes the happy from the unhappy: those who do not pursue happiness as a goal in itself vs. those who do. I suppose this is a question to weigh on the minds of the powerful artists of our world: will they make humanity happier or less happy? A question of their values. And this presupposes that there is a powerful enough force in existence, which there may well not be at this time.
.
Possibly one of the scariest things we face. Created intelligence that outstrips human ability and has no concept of love. One can hope that the ones creating this intelligence at least take heed of Asimov.
Some real MUST SEE TV:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4kyRyKyOpo
Amen brother. If some widget's purchase didn't add to your fishing, hunting, surfing, writing, mountain top navel gazing, etc... Then WTF was it really for? So you could be "more productive" and the majority of that additional productiveness could go to feeding the parasites???
Well said, Oldwood.
Thanks.
As always God bless you Guillaume. Only you can make one crack a smile on the way to the gallows. One day, truly, I believe we'll be able to look back and laugh. I'll be looking for you, hat, shades, in johnny cash compliant regalia on the other side.
I've lost count of the fake names, avatars, and junk email accounts I've created.
A professor in college was enamored with Amazon and its "feature" of tracking your likes and shopping habits.
I told him I used a fake name and junk email account and told them I liked things I didn't like at all.
"Well, we'd better watch out for you!" he said, as if I was some subversive enemy of the state instead of it being the corporate/.gov machine trying to strangle my identity and liberty.
Of course he is the same twit who thought it would be great to replace human teachers with computer based learning modules; I hope his progeny are taken out by Terminators, the dumb knob.
Too many PhD's and not enough real people in this world.
He's an interested party. .gov pays for at least part of his salary. He's a beneficiary of the status quo. This is all a consequence of free money. Savers subsidize his lifestyle.
I believe the term is apparatchik.
On the subject of all data (and analysis of that data) being trustworthy -
It [finance is a perception of reality just as much as climate science is] certainly can be, particularly when hubris or ceteris paribus are involved. But my point really had to the with the nature of modern data itself. Once one gets beyond the capacity of a spreadsheet and moves to a database, one is literally constructing his own Matrix too often replete with blue pills. If both the software and database engineers who build the matrix, and the analysts who use it, are not extremely careful with documenting the business or scientific communities processes for providing data, and extremely conscientious of limits of the data and any transformations, it ceases to be capable of being science and becomes a fantasy virtual reality matrix. The climate folks are easy to pick on because their matrix encompasses the whole world, and supposedly accurately, at least the bankers can accurately count their binary dollar molecules. With a half dozen different, yet simultaneously correct models, running off a handful of back-end datasets where the Climate gods can't even accurately keep track of manual adjustments to their own data records. Not only are they batting .0000 with the projections they are willing to sign their names to beforehand, out the millions of forward simulations they have run, they have never gotten it right. With a large enough confidence interval one can can bound reality, but that's not the same as calculating (guessing) right. If one uses a fat enough highlighter on a piece of paper he can cover just about any function. The NSA represents only one part of the big data nightmare of 21st century, and there's more than just Axciom, ChoicePoint, Palantir and their competitors (Why the Tylers give a neo-Nazi like Peter Thiel the column space I have no idea, but it's their site). If people don't look carefully at the hard and practical limits of big data, we will get Skynet by default, through the natural evolution of the marketing departments of the analytics providers.
Rant Over.
But if you want to see how bad it actually gets in finance - try reconciling EU Eurostat and UN Comtrade data on European trade & finance. If you didn't read the small print, you would never think Eurostat is feeding all the European trade data to Comtrade.
---
Somewhere down the ZH memory hole went a less nihilist, more technical rant on reconstucting original datasets from data warehouses and the limitations of SQL joins...
It is gross, laughable, campy and factual that we will get skynet. After years of self study, painful awakening, planning.. we are set to end up on the set of a terminator movie. No wonder belief in the supernatural is gaining traction because we are heading down a blind fucking alley.
How can you tell if "we are set to end up on the set of a terminator movie" or if, in fact, we are already in a movie/simulation? A fan of science fiction, I remember reading a story back around 1965 (as a guess) wherein the main character discovers he is, in fact, a digital being in a computer run by an advertising company. The purpose of the simulation within which he resides is to give the ad agency insights into how to hook more customers.That was pretty advanced thinking for when the story was written.
Now, however, we have real scientists and mathematicians speculating on whether our 'reality' is a holographic universe, or if we might be living in a digital universe. (Videos are available online covering these lectures.) So just how real is our 'reality'? Being inside a simulation running on some unfathomably large computer would explain lots of weird facts, like how some people seem to recall prior lives, or give an explanation to certain facets of creation as described in the Bible. For examples of that, refer to Isaiah 34:4 and Revelation 6:14, both of which refer to the heavens being rolled up like a scroll.
We will get Skynet, but an IRS & NSA dataset linked to Lockhead Martin ordnance with the integration done by the Wizards responsible for the Obamacare website is both laughable and terrifying. On the bright side, if Obozo were to flick a switch and say "kill Putin" a system could logically compute "deploy a hellfire missile up Reggie Love's ass."
Everyone has actually had the experience of the virtual reality of the Matrix. When you call up a "Customer Service" agent because "virtual reality" says you haven't paid you "fair share" to company or government agency, despite having a cancelled check that proves "their reality" isn't based in fact - it only exists on some muppet's computer screen.
What General Hayden said should be grounds for extermination with extreme prejudice.
Big data isnt the singularity. Not even close. Read the artilect war by hugo degaris if you want a measure of how ai will shut us down.
I never paid ai a passing fancy for many years but recently started looking into it more and it is nothing less than a death sentence for us.
Many mainstream laureates ( Elon Musk ) are on record questioning the path we are on for ai research which didnt give me pause until i looked at it more closely.
A comprehensive compendium of collected private and public data where some algorithm has access to it is scary. The idea of transumanism is scary.
However.. the idea that the logical conclusion of the path that we are on is artificial intelligence becoming not only self aware but considering humans a threat or an annoyance is really where we are at. It sounds alarmist, and it takes apocalyptic crash and burn porn to a new level, but that is where we are.
As a guy who is normally the smartest guy in the room yet not being able to properly quantify the threat of singularity is staggering.
Where the fukk is john connor.
I also consider humans a threat or an annoyance, and I'm neither artificial or intelligent.
What is not said speaks as much as what is said.
Does anyone still play Poker, or has that oughties fad died out?
"Lieutenant - look, another one from this IP area that is registering with a birthday of Jan 1, 1970. Probably a ZeroHedge nutjob, stacker and prepper. Yep, they shop with cash only at local hardware stores, buy lots of odds and ends, live up a dirt road, with a well maintained house and garden. Here is a view from Google Earth. Shall I task a drone to hover one mile away and take video?"
If you only show up at the bank to deposit or withdrawal checks and cash and never use an ATM, Debit or RFID card, that shows up just as clearly as swiping your Amex to buy something.
I'm making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do... www.globe-report.com
This movie was never finished.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gFXaFnjY2Q
Edit; this one was never finished as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx4c7qXUcHk
< Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
< Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Pull the plug. Problem solved. But then you already know that. Nobody really wants a solution....
This is the goal... And obviously I have not achieved it.
I can just hear you chanting on Sunday nights "EMP! EMP!"
It is clearer every day that the true elite.. the ones who laugh at normal millionaires, are driving the bus so no, it wont be unplugged. They will have access to the true singularity while the few remaining drones will be enhanced enough to do their jobs.
That is provided HAL doesnt tire of us first.
Big data is one of the facets of the transumanist crowd, who view all existence as information systems, so popular at Bilderberg and Davos.
Have a peek at the artwork outside the Bilderberger meeting in this post:
http://souloftheeast.org/2014/11/26/transhumanism-genocide/
Bingo, see my Common Core post below.
Terry Gillian's latest film, the Zero Theorem covers it the paradigm beautifully.
Man that one lost me. I couldn't get into it at all.
Common Core - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptgHOKejq_Q
foil https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urglg3WimHA
I never seem to finish all my foodI always get a doggie bag from the waiter
So I just keep what's still unchewed
And I take it home, save it for later
But then I deal with fungal rot, bacterial formation
Microbes, enzymes, mold and oxidation
I don't care, I've got a secret trick up my sleeve
I never bother with baggies, glass jars, tupperware containers
Plastic cling wrap, really a no-brainer
I just like to keep all my flavours sealed in tight
With aluminum foil (foil)
Never settle for less
That kind of wrap is just the best
To keep your sandwich nice and fresh
Stick it in your cooler (cooler)
Eat it when you're ready
But maybe you'll choose (you'll choose, you'll choose, you'll choose)
A refreshing herbal tea
[Sip] Mmm, lovely!
Oh, by the way, I've cracked the code
I've figured out these shadow organizations
And the Illuminati know
That they're finally primed for world domination
And soon you've got black helicopters coming 'cross the border
Puppet masters for the New World Order
Be aware: there's always someone that's watching you
And still the government won't admit they faked the whole moon landing
Thought control rays, psychotronic scanning
Don't mind that, I'm protected cause I made this hat
From aluminum foil (foil)
Wear a hat that's foil lined
In case an alien's inclined
To probe your butt or read your mind
Looks a bit peculiar ('culiar)
Seems a little crazy
But someday I'll prove (I'll prove, I'll prove, I'll prove)
There's a big conspiracy
+1 for effort
Oh it was weird al...........
-1 for you then
+1 for Al
No soup for you.
Meh. It is just a bubble. It will blow up too as a result of malinvestment.
In the mean time, I wonder if BigData can tell the difference between a hot broad and a fat slob behind a computer.
Well.
Computer Scientists / Data Scientists built a neural network to detect some sort of disease and none of them knew anything about medicine or biology prior to building it.
Crowd sourced data models beat out state farms actuarys for a casuality model
machine learning is taking over.
certainly is.... http://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/
The system acquires power by convincing you that what you possess is worthless and what they have to sell is priceless. This is how they purchased our liberties so cheaply. Its played the same way every time. Fashions change yet there is little new. Go to an antique store and buy back the crap your parents threw away thirty years ago. We are being programmed and what you think is important, what you think is relevant, are implanted notions like a chip in your head, something we will all be yearning for considering how much more convenient it will be, like the GPS in your phone.
Induced to "earn" and induced to "spend" rather than simply allowed to live. Humans are the single greatest resource on the planet. Peak oil is nothing when you can harness humanity.
I work as a data analyst at a big financial services company and can attest to the fact that with some basic knowledge and alittle creativity I can find out alot about whether or not a person will buy something.
data mining and machine learning aren't new per se..it's just that its cheap to store lots of information now and there are tools that almost anyone can use with some basic trainining and desire to learn.
i wouldn't call my self a quant or a data scientist but i can do quite a bit of nifty stuff.
The real implications of using machine learning in everyday processes is that most companies outside of tech who use it will not have access to the right people to maintain their models.
Expect alot of "smart devices" expereincing some sort of "flash crash" because of poor prelinary planning.
Oh yeah..get the fuck off facebook and twitter..that shit says WAyyy to much about you.
Food, gas, cigarettes, liquor, snow tires and cable television.
<<... I can find out alot about whether or not a person will buy something.>>
i dont even get access to that kind of cool data..mostly just things like age and income and i can see some kewl stuff.
Why Are You Telling Me? Enjoy
Yasmine Meddour| Alone
Once the data collection services meltdown, they will have lost their business model.
Boot and Nuke
https://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/Government/MDG/NSA_CSS_Storage_Device_Declassification_Manual.pdf
Why would anyone need to predict your actions when they can front-run your actual actions in real-time, as you make them? Who cares what price you will buy and sell at and when, when all the prices are false ones including the price of the currency you use to buy things with?
I agree..HFT isnt about machine learning so it seems..more like having smart engineers build low latency systms to act on the priviledge info they pay for to front run everyone else
No matter how scary he makes it sound...
...the reality is not scary enough.
Absolutely. The prospects frighten me, being one who doesnt indulge in modern day bread and circus. However, I know i lack the intelligence to properly calculate how fukked we likely are. As ive dipped my foot into the realm of transumanism, ai and the singularity i can say it makes my head hurt, and even though i dont get it I get it enough to know we are fucked barring something biblical.
from carbon copies to the 'giant-talking-head' requires an organic garden of eugenics where fibre is nought neurons
?
Not sure I understand. "to identify the unique individual purchasing patterns of 90% of the people involved" It doesn't say it identifies the people involved. It's a collection of purchasing patterns that belong to who knows.
I can see a marketing company using the pattern as the means to capture an audience even if they don't know who the audience is. Anyway Amazon tracks purchases to names already to suggest other items of possible interest and so does Netflix.
It's the criminal state that is the problem.
Welcome back. I love the "voice of reason".
The Government is like a [Pimp] advertising his prostitutes to experience a quick thrill and prolong the debt cycling buyer’s remorse.
Better Call Saul? The lawyer from "Breaking Bad" has a new series.
Hahahahahaha. That was a good one. Obama will ask the IRS to open the safe with IRS observing him with duffle bags to steal money for DNC 2016 election.
/sarc
I'm not joking! A&E is starting a new series called "Saul" tomorrow night.
It has that "Breaking Bad" bent to it.
P.S. The IRS will find a VOO DOO doll and Obungas' birth certificate in that safe. lol
What difference does it make if they can identify you personally? Does it matter to the rancher if he can identify each individual cow in his herd? He understands his inputs and has a very good handle on expectations. His livestock will respond as he has planned and anticipated. They will be there when the grain is put out. There are programmed and well studied so there will be no question as to what to expect.
Our danger lies in our inability to resist this programming, and this loss of liberty will ultimately enslave us, even if it happens seemingly voluntarily.
Slave owners did not rely on chains and fences to restrain their slaves. They simply understood their motivations, controlled their inputs, and to a large degree were able to retain a largely "voluntary" slave population. We are all programmable, and I am convinced most of us are. We are slowly at first and then rapidly becoming voluntary slaves, with the few outliers and resistors facing "removal". Sadly, as we have been indoctrinated and manipulated for so long, it may well be impossible to determine exactly who is truly living outside of this " contrived reality" and who is living the dream.
Big data isnt the singularity. You are right that some catalog of the size and color of gonch people order is not nefarious.
What we need to prepare for is a misguided cyber alchemist unleashing a homunculis they cant handle.
Why does all this exist? It's all about money and this is my 3 year old topic, The Data Selling Epidemic in the US and I'm not the only one talking about it. It particularly disturbs me as I used to write code and all you have to do as a programmer, like an under cover cop does for example, it put on your "asshole" hat and think like one for a while and you can pretty much figure out what's going on. Be aware that all the major banks are heavy into their Fintech apps and all have labs in the Silicon Valley to build them also known as "The California Code Rush"
Those apps have two purposes, do something for the consumer and suck all the data in at the back end, where you don't see it. It's been going on for a while in healthcare and I've written tons about it. People have thought I'm nuts, but I'm not. Three years ago when I started talking about it there was a much larger denial factor going on and today people are slowly waking up. This is why I tell all to watch at least video #1 at the Killer Algorithms page so you can tune into Quantitated Justification for Things that are not true, how you get duped. It's a code hosing world and those that have the code get the money from the rest of us.
http://www.ducknet.net/attack-of-the-killer-algorithms/
A good time to mention this with the Anthem breach, why in the hell don't they spend more money on security instead of buying our credit card transactions and stock buybacks? With the breach, we might anticipate the buy backs to chill down a little I think. Look at this company, Argus who buys up our credit card data, scores you and then sells both the data and your "score" to banks, insurers and wait for this one...the good old Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Richard Cordray had to be hand picked by JPMorgan and Citiban as he does just enough low hanging fruit action to make it appear he's working hard, in between his appearances on Jeopardy.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2014/08/argus-analytics-produces-share-of...
Back to Anthem for a moment..what do these hackers want? They want to sell data too and make big money as they can make more by getting repackaged data in the legal circulation and it's not that hard to do as look at how counterfeit drugs do it. I seem to be the only one that recognizes how the hackers want to be data sellers too, and why not when there's $180 billion a year market for it. Maybe Anthem should invest more in security and less money buying our credit card data, you think?
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2015/02/anthem-data-breachcrooks-want-to-sell.html
Oh I'm into this big time as it also impacts the accelerated growth of inequality in the US and there's a direct impact as big data and the subsequent queries score you into a corner and you can't get out.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2014/06/data-selling-and-direct-correlation-to.html
Here's what I have been beating the FTC and Congress over the head about for years, and even on Twitter old Emanuel Derman chipped in the other day agreeing, where's the frigging index? You can't regulate until you know who the players are so in the meantime be ready for some more flawed data to "score" you. I guess the answer will be to go steal someone else's identity you like better (sarcasm):)
http://www.youcaring.com/other/help-preserve-our-privacy-/258776
Read some of my input to where I am now a tagged person who uses blood thinners..it's totally false and out there due to flawed data and sloppy data work with big data. Sadly, bad data gets the same price as good data so yeah, we're screwed and the indexing is step one that every stupid lawyer has missed. Lawyers are stupid with this as they keep believing the data selling industry can self regulate...yeah..like saying stock brokers can self regulate:)
im in the business too, but not as a devloper..more on the user side (building models, research, etc) and some coding
i got rid of facebook for a reason..
and double upvotes for you for your "thinking like an asshole" comments because I do it all the time and I know the TPTB are doing what i can only dream of if i had the resources.
i try to tell my family and friends about this shit and they think im nut.
whatever.
Surprised it took you that long to figure out. Back in the WIN95 OS and dialup, we would fuck up MSN Chat threads. Bill Gates would change the key privileges. We just modified source code and let the bots run a hellfire on MSN. I was a bad boy in my mid-twenties. Nothing has changed, today they just call it P/E revenue on Wall Street. We did it for free to torture Bill Gates.
Facebook Fraud
They are still using fuzzy logic to grasp at tieing shoe strings to collect consumer data. Opt-out of one of many companies.
http://corp.intelius.com
If your an Engineer, Plumber, Electrician, Baker, Doctor, Farmer and do real work you will get to live.
If you financial parasite, Banker, Lawer, Judge, Politician, Community organiser, Bureaucrat, Entertainer (all the BS jobs) your dead.
Only those who can repair, have a trade and contribute will get to see another day.
ELSE your not required IE Dead. Just logic.
We should build a space ship, load it with managers, hairdressers, and those guys who clean pay-phone recievers and send them to another planet.
Golgafrincham thought so ;)
I'm pretty sure Big Data is another IT industry buzzword. My friend and colleague works on our Big Data system and told me its basically all hype. I've worked on technical projects very similar to the one's under discussion and my view is its all hype. I could go into details but they are all pointless.
Basically, transhumanists evince a fundamental misunderstanding of the theory of mind. It follows as a natural consequence of their mechanistic, mind-is-in-the-brain, physical/materialist model of mind. They believe that a pseudo-rational Yes/No choice-making mechanism is somehow representative of consciousness. Its not.
Its the emotions of man which tie him to the higher energies of spirit. Emotions give meaning and significance, they deliver the 'context' which prioritizes stimuli and 'give our lives meaning'. Emotions are what enable you to raise a family, form a coherent worldview, and deal with and understand other people. Emotions also tie into spiritual energies which are higher and more mysterious energies, yet more elusive and even *more* meaningful than emotions.
This "intelligence" of ours, which we clearly are not self-aware enough to understand very deeply at all, is not to be approximated by a bunch of logic rules, which is all computers can understand. Life cant be reduced to IF/THEN statements, even if you have a chip that can crunch them at unbelievable speed. It works for deterministic systems such as chess games and simpson's quiz games, but for the ambiguous game of Life, they are useless. To think that a collection of IF/THEN logic rules running on a series of semiconductors could encompass, or even approach, the power of human consciousness, is to misunderstand who and what we are, and what our minds come from, and what they are for.
It's all done with molecules. Right now ours are better than theirs, but give it time.
Life cant be reduced to IF/THEN statements, even if you have a chip that can crunch them at unbelievable speed.
But it can, apparently in your view, be reduced to chemical transfers between neurons, as that's all our brains do. The difference is.. not readily visible to anyone with some engineering training and an imaginative mind.
McLuhan noted years ago that when a technology speeds up past a certain point, it morphs from one thing to something completely different. For example, the photograph. Itself a transformative technology - look at what happened to 'palette and easel' "art" after the photo came along - what happens when we speed the photo up by a mere 24 times? We get movies, and if you don't think watching a movie is quantitatively and qualitatively different than viewing a few hundred photos (or reading a book), than your experience and knowledge of human beings is so alien from mine, we can't discuss this.
Similarly, a car engine sped up becomes a turboprop, and we have airplanes. The speed up of the initial medium produces a new medium which is qualitatively different than its predecessor. You can amass a million cars on the eastern sea board, and one Lear Jet can carry more people across the ocean than those cars can, ever. The huge speed-up of data acquisition, and the huge new capability in associating, processing, and analyzing that data will produce new systems that are unlike any we have seen before. It matters not that you believe this; it's happening, just as the waves crashed over Canute's feet as he tried to tell his fawning courtiers that he was only a man, and could not hold them back.
You should investigate the new BI tools, which use in-memory associative databases to outperform static relational ones. It's not that these tools deliver more quantitative data faster and more easily; it's that they deliver new insights that weren't even possible in the old technology.
Boy I guess my shopper card is telling my heath insurer that I eat too many hot dogs cause I buy them for my dogs. But since they know I have dogs by registering them online they must think I either don't feed them enough or I am stealing dog food. What will I do when the animal cruelty squad kicks in my front door and the anti shoplifting goons kick in my rear door. Maybe they will shoot each other. Fighting over who is going to take me away and save the world from such a menace.
How Does a Transistor Work?
Why do you think the negro in White House closed down coke plants?
Hey Atomizer, The Choomster In Charge, couldn't find it's "Birth Certificate" printed on Venezuelan "rented" Ass Wipes.
Speaking of O/S. I'm running LINUX UBUNTU as we speak. Windows sucks. I'm trading my account "open source".
I don't even have to use "WINE" (Windows program converter) on LINUX anymore.
I started on FreeBSD 20 years ago and am big into linux career wise and personally. Ubuntu looks to be becoming the windows of the linux world. 12.10 desktop integrated a push of your program/document search terms to Amazon. Not sure what they are doing now but I won't run a default desktop install from them anymore. Debian (the base of ubuntu) also severely damaged trust years before when they screwed up the ssh system allowing your keys to be easily guessed. At this point in time you probably can't entirely trust any distribution. A lot of required base libraries have the governments hands all over them. SELinux was put out by the NSA, can't trust any distribution that includes that. The crazy thing is this stuff is all open source (a million times better than windows) and they still find stuff all the time. The complexity of these systems would allow those with unlimited resources (the gov) to spend many man lifetimes of labor each year finding unique ways to trojan these systems.
Also I had a MS core team developer as a roommate a while back. All their code is proprietary (not heavily audited) and built to pass tests. It doesn't really matter what code is in there as long as it passes the unit testing. It makes the products generally work like they are supposed to, and quite often the ability to work not like it is supposed to if you know the insides. MS also receives direct 'help' from 3 letter agencies, and I'm sure that has reached deep into the open source world as well. Something like OpenBSD might be your best bet, but good luck with usability compared to something like Windows or Ubuntu.
At this point in time I believe it would be fairly safe to assume if you are connected to a public network you are vulnerable, with enough know how you might be able to get a system setup that would require such a level of focused resources that you might actuallly maintain privacy unless someone thinks you have a nuke or are about to leak some status quo changing information.
Either way, you're still using the same browsers/networks/websites as you would with windows and at best are slightly less trackable than the average PC user.
After stumbling across this exchange - I can honestly say that there is not one iota of info there that I understand. I'm going to go rotate some supplies and have a beer. Next thing I'll find out my Kaypro is obsolete.
Nah, if in good condition it happens to be worth more than some computers ~200x faster with ~16,000x more RAM.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, or miracles.
Sorry for the cognitive dissonance to the Parties affected or implied. ;-)
I noticed while reading this article that all the ads on the side were quite relevant to my lifestyle.
try ad blocker
try Adblock plus, Flashblock and Ghostery - browser addons
Stuff like that is really basic. I read cyclingmews.com and viola and ad for competitivecyclist.com pops up on some random place like Zhedge while I'm reading something about some random algo acting crazy for a milisecond during the trading day.
You have an unique ip address. That is your id. It has at least a general geographic location (zip code) attached to it. ALL the shit that comes up on your screen is connected to that ip address.
Then the machines and equations take over and place ads here and there.
But does anyone actually BUY?SELL anything through this? I can attest that not a single ad ever has ended in a single dime of income for any advertiser put in front of me on my computer. Once the folks laying out all the cash for these ads (the producers) realise it's a complete waste of time and their financial situations are such that they need to cut way back just to survive once the free money spigot runs dry, then the shit all comes crashing down.
Click the little "X" on the upper right of them to kill them and just say the ones like gun ads aren't relevant but the ones like "my little pony" are...
It’s bad enough that these social surveillance systems figure us out sufficiently to use it to their advantage. The scarier thing is when the huge and powerful companies and organizations operating them reduce you to a file of analysis and data profiles and start making it the only thing that is socially relevant about you. That’s where I see the likes of Facebook, Google, and Twitter going with all this. Whereas someone might have once said, he’s a tall, witty, decent looking guy who likes to read and play basketball, in their world vision it only matters that he trades stocks after 3:oo p.m., shops for most of his clothes online, buys a truck every four years, subscribes to Netflix for entertainment, etc., etc. In other words, they are forcing a social system upon you where your identity will be described and your importance as a human being will be determined primarily by the traits and behaviors documented in their master data base. It’s analogous to FICO scores in the individual credit markets. It’s more about social engineering than social networking. You can argue their goal is the same as every marketing company since the dawn of time. But, the difference now is that these companies have orders of magnitutde more information to work with than any ever did before. Your Miranda Rights don’t help when everything you say can and will be used against you.
exactly..this is why i get a laugh out of the idiots who hate on big data and think its an "IT Buzzword"
It certainly is, but there is some cutting edge research going on and machine learning is revolutionizing obscure fields outside of business applications and doing it VERY fast.
what tards here dont realize is that while off the shelf algorithms are powerful (Decision treees, Supprt vector machines, Neural nets, etc) the models that are custom made are very high level and are very, very good.
put it it this way...the C5.0 decision tree is a propriotary algorithm that comes with IBM spss modeler and has features built in to accomodate for missing or erroneous data and can snuff alot of things out automatically..no fancy coding skills needed...
the quants have models that can detect weird things and get accurate analysis of them.
its getting scary!!!
Big Data in it's real meaning is just another marketing hype.
The real danger to privacy are not some fuzzy logic methods, but the connection/combining of completely different sourced data pools through established unique identifiers such as SSN. As that would be across companies, that usually has some three-letter agencies centrally involved.
And at this time you can still easily avoid becoming traceable in credit card transactions: pay with fucking cash.
take facebook. facebook collects (on worst days) 1,3 billion h of real time click behaviour every hour.
interconnected with all the other cookie and ad-sites.
Thats more in one hour than all the non computer times knowledge ever written down before.
unfortunately that knowledge is now not in the hands of benevolent leftists (like in the 60s)
but in the hands of cut throat capitalists optimizing crap-delivery.
I think I'd rather have capitalists using the data to sell me crap than have the lefties and the govt restrict my ability to buy said crap.
The 99.99% sheeple will never ever learn.
They have sold themselfs and their freedoms (as long as there were any at all) to the 0.01% - since Stoneage.
Ignorance, greed and short memories the most ultimative leading forces since manhood exists.
They are all worthless - the 0.01% as well as the 99.99% which let it happen - since Stoneage.
So they both get what they deserve: slavery and guillotines and tsunamis.
For some more zillion of years.
Until finally they are maybe eventually able to get their greed and ignorance and short memories under control.
Maybe. Eventually. Very unlikely though.
As this is the most useless rotten corrupt deceiving stealing lying shit ugly species this planet has ever seen.
Thank you Lucifer. You are truly inspiring.
They are just doing what they are told to do. Blame it on bad management and a propaganda machine aimed at neutralizing the masses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hT_nvWreIhg
OneRepublic (Make that $, Watch it Burn)
"Artificial" intelligence is the goal. But only to be used as a prosthesis for the expansion of our own minds, if we can get our shit together and manage to not destroy ourselves first
All of this "artificial intelligence will take over the world" bullshit is absolutley assinine. Sorry folks, but Terminator 2 was only fiction
Would the human race recognize artificial intelligence at all?
At this,point, what's the use of artificial intelligence? We've advanced far enough for my liking.
Back in the Cold War, America bankrupted the USSR with an arms race.
It's questionable whether Reagan ever actually built the kit - he just let the Soviets "find out" that he had.
They went crazy trying to keep up and ran out of money.
Now in 2015 we have Eddie Snowden, telling us the State is all-seeing and all-knowing.
That doesn't really match my experience of the State, who can't find their ass with both hands and a map.
Maybe Snowden was used to flush game - you can't search every cyberthicket for libertarians, but if you can make them bolt for Tor you suddenly have a visible target?
I'm flattered that .gov is so interested in little old me, that they take steps to document and track my spending and clicking habits.
What a time saver.
No more hours spent by the fire jotting down my memoirs.
The story is being written in real time.
I hope that isn't what you take away from this article. The big old government is interested in you??? How quaint an idea.
Need Butlerian Jihad now!!!
So what will they do when Big Data says"Gold Bitchez"?
Epsilon have their unique way of writing articles.
Big data - now I have a picture in my head of a giant evil brent spiner stomping about screaming "I am the singularity!"
Data centers are very fragile... and quite susceptible to hand grenade blasts.. just saying in Humor. of course.
The corporate and political powers which are centralizing and controling these data systems aren’t bothered by the fact they have an impossible task to do well or fairly. They could care less that their measures, ratings, and profiles of us are shallow, narrow, incomplete, outdated, and sometimes even downright wrong depictions of our true selves. That won’t stop them from using their immense corporate and political power to foist them on us anyway until one day and you won’t be able to get a job unless your Facebook “Like-Ratio” is greater than 75%. The systems and their processes will become institutionalized standards. Their clients will all be on their side too, because, “what the hell, they already paid for and invested in it and there’s too much money at stake to try and undo it now.” It’s more about social engineering than social networking. And succumb to it you will or you will not be able to even function in society.
The point is, Artificial Intelligence and Smart Technology doesn’t need to be intelligent or smart to be effective at controlling us. It’s probably even more threatening when it isn't.
We all know the great vision of a super computer that has human-like self-awareness, the ability to learn on its own and generate original thoughts and ideas. But, has anyone ever considered this super computer might naturally evolve like human brains often do in a way that is, um, a bit lame?
For example, we might end up with the super Lindsay Lohan computer, which becomes addicted to electricity requiring it to shut down for repairs every 30 days. We might get the super Tom Cruise computer, which makes up its own wacky religion and spends twenty hours a day trying to persuade everyone else to join. We might get the Kim Kardashian computer which only thinks it’s super even though every human (and all the other computers too) know that it really isn’t. We might get a bigoted, racist, anti-semitic computer which blames Blacks, Liberals, or Jews every time it can’t calculate a simple answer to a complex socio-economic problem. We might get a computer that goes completely insane, imagines itself to be Tinkerbell, and only spams “Make A Wish” emails to everyone which never get answered when they reply.
Yes, I do believe computer scientists when they say, “Anything is possible”.
Voice may be recorded..nope...millions of algorithms at health insurers and other places come running to evaluate your current state of mind on the phone at call centers. A file of such is made and some of this gets sold to behavioral analytists...be careful when you speak to the call centers:)
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2014/05/this-call-may-be-recorded-for-qua...
If you are in a state where it takes two to consent to recording of calls, or if the company calling is incorporated in one, just open your conversation with "I do not consent" when the automated voice says "this" or "some calls" may be recorded for customer service bla bla bla. It automatically invalidates it for legal purposes, and in the case of sales calls they (by my experience) hang up immediately.
So we live in a world of "text autocorrect on crack".
Can we turn that off?
Reading people's "anonymous" posts, listening in to private conversations, or reading texts and emails might give someone an idea of "who someone else is" but what I buy at the grocery store, the clothing store, the hardware store, or when I washed my car, not so much.
I don't know what that paragraph means because it's written in gibberish, but yes, your interpretation of it is correct, analyzing "bigdata" for consumer patterns using "datascience" is the business fad of the year. And it's often very creepy, even the practitioners say so.
HOWEVER it is entirely unclear whether it works.
I mean hey, if you can analyze raw data and predict from it, why not just analyze market movements and make a zillion dollars trading oil futures and FB? Because the market is a random walk, that's why. Well, more or less, y'all know what I mean. Nobody in bigdata has proven that individuals are not just as random, and all of this bigdata analysis posterior garp.
It probably gives a better profile of who is walking in the mall, but whatever they are buying is whatever they are buying, so I'm not sure how much even that could matter.
You really want loudspeakers in front of every store that know your name, or at least your "profile", so as you walk past the GNC it blares, "Hey Clem! Come on for some iron pills and a nice homeopathic testosterone booster, you know you need it!"
Data is also "being kept" on the people who are keeping this data. It's just as dangerous to them as it is to those they intend to control. There has to be lots of Snowdens out there and there has to be lots of ways they can expose these perps without revealing themselves.