Big Data: The Final Frontier and Beyond

The Zero Gravity Challenge between Big Data and iData

Mary Reisel

“To boldly go where no one has gone before”?

You don’t need to be a Star Trek fan in order to be able to quote the famous opening words of the TV series and movie franchise. There are enough loyal fans all over the world who will gladly do it for you, generation after generation. But you need to be a passionate discovery seeker and adventure rider if you want to follow the ideology and take a new unknown road.

It seems that in business, we’re increasingly compelled and challenged to become eager seekers and discoverers on a way to explore new fields and spaces ‘where no one has gone before’. And yet, if you really are enthusiastic about seeking new adventures along the road of the latest buzzwords – “creativity”, “originality”, “innovation” – you will often discover they are mostly a foreplay interrupted. Many times, even if you’re taking-off with a payload brimming full of brilliant and innovative ideas, you are heading for a rough landing (or worse).

Many big businesses, regardless of field and industry, might offer challenging missions, interesting work, fascinating research opportunities, and maybe even stimulating travels to discover new worlds. However being adventurous, or creative for that matter, are often not part of the brief. Quite the contrary. The bigger the corporation, the more conservative it becomes. As one of my colleagues told me after six months of work on a unique development (and quite an expensive one): “It’s absolutely amazing! Now, who can we follow?.. We must find someone else who has already done it! We can’t be the first.”

As harmony is a core value of utmost importance within Japanese culture, it can explain the hesitation of businesses to become the one that breaks the norms and demonstrate “non-harmonious” behavior. Their role in society is to be the ones actually setting the norms and supervising them. But it is quite surprising to learn it’s the same in other cultures and in many big corporations. Stakeholders, turnover of employees, financial worries, the list stating the reasons for running in one place is long but the result is the same. It’s enough to look at the development of the mobile phone industry over the past 20 years to see evidence of the stagnation of innovation. Most corporations follow their competition horizontally rather than aspire to fly high and break on through to the other side of the new, exciting, and different.

It’s of no surprise, therefore, to see how tech innovations such as Big Data and Artificial Intelligence were adopted very quickly by many businesses of all sizes and fields, whether they need these research tools or not, whether they understand their meaning or not - and whether they use them or not. Big Data ended up a concept, an added brand value, and a cool hype used to create an aura of a sophisticated image of innovations and state-of-the-art knowledge. It was thought to be the contemporary “magic potion” that will transform research methods and guarantee results and success. But for the majority, the magic didn’t – and hasn’t – happened.

When Having More is Having Less

Lost in numbers, the results of big data analytics are misused, misunderstood, and misplaced in development of products and designs that don’t yield success. One of the reasons is the pressure of time resulting from the fact that AI can calculate big data much faster than ordinary calculating machines and the promise of immediate results is (mis)translated into immediate development, immediate products, and immediate guaranteed profits - values that were dominant at the beginning of this century.

Another reason is the increase in using the “money of others” rather than investing in one’s own project and business. Stakeholders, investors, loan-sharks, entrepreneurs and business owners who claim they believe in the new business and push for accepting loans and the fake promise of success. Many fall into the trap of the promised land and end up asking money from others to develop them rather than use their own. The rate of success is usually less than 5% and varies according to the country, the field of investment, and the size of the population. Taking all into account, it is a very low rate when it comes to repaying debts in high amount.

Above all the reasons resulting from the nature of the market and the forms of business interaction hovers one the biggest obstacles of change and innovation: the big divide that still separates disciplines and faculties in most universities and academic institutions. A divide that leads to lack of sharing and fruitful cooperation between fields of knowledge that actually complement each other and should join knowledge in order to flourish and advance. For example, computer science, anthropology, behavioral economics, and neuroscience which recently have so many interconnecting points. Or I can look even closer to my own professional field that has been split into so many sub-divisions: design anthropology, business anthropology, bio-anthropology, cultural anthropology, forensic anthropology, and the list is by far too long to mention in one paragraph. But anthropology is a way of looking at the world, it is a way of thinking, of asking questions and of researching from specific angles. It comes to provide a holistic view of the world around us and to show how each segment of culture and life is connected to another. Is each one of the sub-division above really so different from the others? How can anthropology suggest it is a holistic view of research if it is being roughly cut into so many separated units?

The Second Renaissance and the futuristic new mediators

Struggling to prove its value, anthropology spread its wings into all the different new domains while trying to have a grip on a wider net of knowledge. But ultimately, however we choose to name it, anthropology is a discipline which stays loyal to its original mission. A mission of understanding people and the culture in which they live - be it a tribe in the woods, a community online, or an ancient village in prehistoric times. Therefore, many anthropologists see “the data of the one” as the initial step-stone of any research focused on people and communities, and they perceive the new rising “data of the many” as a threat to the value of the one. Traditional research still follows the basic ideology of deep research of individual needs, participant-observation in real time and space, and analysis of the cultural values and the decision-making processes required from the individuals. For example, if a wine business is targeting the Japanese market, an ethnographic research should include individual interviews with people who enjoy (or don't enjoy) drinking, a research of drinking habits of alcohol in Japan, forms of drinking, forms of socializing and entertainment, the history of collective drinking, types of alcoholic drinks and their historical development, places and locations of drinking, and the extent of which the one has to accept the collective expectation of drinking with the group since Japan is a highly collective society.

Computer Scientists go through the same disciplinary cracks and conflicts as anthropologists and they also display utter loyalty to their discipline which is based on logic, math, and algorithms rather than observing the real people around them. For them, the success of the new wine brand will be calculated by numbers of previous sales of wine (separating different foreign brands), seasonal drinking and types of drinks, and stats analysis.

The Second Renaissance is a set of short animation features in the wonderful movie Animatrix. They portray a sequence of wars between humans and machines where victory fluctuates in-between for a while eventually machines seem to win. But winning is at the price of mutual dependency that leads to the creation of a new species. Brave new world.

What we all need now is to adopt the mediation model from statistics and to start investigating the dependency rather than the independence between the different disciplines of the Humanities and the Sciences. Computers and humans are not - nor should they be - at war with each other, and knowledge can only add to knowledge. There is no negative equation for knowledge; there is only the danger of ignorance and fast-forward thinking based on the phantasmagoria of algorithms as solutions. Data is producing excellent insights into a current situation, anthropology can learn a lot from this tool, but the best stats in the world are still lacking insight and understanding and without the deeper meaning it equals the Three Wise Monkeys - wise but impaired. Our mutual goal should be to leave behind the disciplinary pride and reinforcement of boundaries and to generate a new Renaissance. If we don’t start now, we will end up divided and lost. It is time for Data to blend with the iData.