BIG DATA BIG PERSPECTIVES

One of the major problems with technological change in Western World is communication style and consequential perceptions by people. Generally speaking you can measure a sense of fear and frustration toward new technologies, fear for unemployment, frustration because new difficult things to understand that will change my life and I can’t do nothing. In Asia, mainly in Japan, technology is always presented as friendly with human beings and people have positive perceptions, motivating to acceptation and change. Of course these feelings are rooted in deep cultural values so differing each other.But the innovators do few efforts to facilitate the understanding of what happens.Nowadays is the subject of Big Data, Robotics, and AI to focus discussions on media world.
The vision of the new world in so rapid development is fascinating for open culture and personally I am very angry to be too old to see the new society that will flourish, because i can see so many field of applications which will improve our lives and prolong them perhaps to biblical span of life, in good health. But of course there is a growing disappointment with these technological trends, after a so long financial crisis and diffused unemployment in most rich countries. It’s very clear that the change will be radical in professional works, not only in workers jobs, and in managerial roles. The cultural gap will widen and so the efforts to new educational curricula from primary schools to University,but its also an inevitable process. In our present times we are living in society very old in their structures, habits, cultures, not exploiting already the present technology possibilities in infrastructures,transportations, public administration, health systems, educational processes, houses, family living and so on. Technology is used at 20% perhaps of its potential and that
it’s because of human beings education and the way the new is communicated. Take for example Big Data:
this is not a new concept, it is a reality of millions data coming from millions sources in industrial and financial systems, in consumptions and satellites instruments, in scientific and technical day by day work. Also the powerful statistical tools to exploit new significance from this chaos through correlations among so many variables are not new, but isolated in the statistician culture, one of the more specialistic existing in our Universities.And they couldn’t be applied on large scale because of lacking of supercomputers, which now are available at reasonable cost. So from now on we will explore an enormous amount of new possibilities, changing our world and our lives. If the perception remain always negative, we will loose other ground in the change process, not jumping on another crossing train, like we have done on energy, automation, supply chain, schools and so on.
Recently I got in touch with one of the new enterprises starting every day in the most advanced countries, and based only on Big Data approach. The name is Terra Seismic and from six years they work on exploiting Big Data from satellites to earthquake forecasting, an impossible thing according to Italian academicians. In Italy we are disgusted by a repetitive cycle of earthquake happening-excavations with hands-funerals with government representatives-big money for reconstruction (if really used and not destroyed by corruption). From my child times this has been always the Italian way to approach earthquakes, endemic in this country: at least we should be bored of it!
But nothing change in the country of beauty…sleeping in the forest. The technicians of this company,started to process until 400 parameters collected normally from satellites like temperature, pressures, shape of clouds, water disappearing, geological structure, historical data and so on, and the results are impressive with a possibility of anticipating an earthquake from 4 to 12 months in a certain area, having time span for emergency measure on houses, monuments and people. We should talk on newspaper and magazines of these positive results of a Big Data approach, not only of unemployment of managers, sometimes also positive, considering economic results of our firms and banks!
People don’t have informations about the potential of the new technologies: a radical revolution in the way of living is arriving from the group of visionaries like Elon Musk or Larry Ellison. The new technology wave will enlarge the gap between civilised and not civilised countries, between culture of the future and residual of the past. It’s a must to adapt to change and all the available resource should be concentrated on education of children, redesigning all the levels of schools, pushing also parents to study to avoid bad consulting to their daughters and sons, using any communication mass media to introduce and presenting potential of technology and science. Time to our future is reducing every day and we must diffuse a sense of urgency on these themes, not on ridiculous political chatting and stupid subjects that will disappear in less than ten years.