Data, data everywhere

These are the times of information revolution, more fashionably called information age. When was information nor crucial is still not clear. But let us not debate that. So the new jargon is ‘big data’, ‘cloud computing’ and many more fancy coinages. So there are companies into the manufacture of so-called intelligent machines, claiming that these provide insights without limits. Well, for a student of Abnormal Psychology, that is more of a problem than a solution. Yes, insights without limits are reasons for fantasising and causing delusions, of both persecution as well as grandeur. And, of course, they also convert bounded rationality into unfounded assumptions. Anyway, we are in an era where people use stylish phrases like ‘data is the next oil’ for this world. Whatever that means may not be easily inferred but the fact remains that mankind can survive without data or oil but not without water, which is the real impending threat lurking round the corner. As city after city go waterless, clues are hardly discernable. Nevertheless, as this craze for data grows to maddening levels, there is a need to exercise some caution. While we are slowly but surely getting submerged in the ocean of information, nay data, an old poetry comes to mind. It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge who wrote this sometime around the end of the 18th Century in his Lyrical Ballads. It was the ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, a sailor’s plight on board a ship surrounded by water all over in a vast ocean, forcing him to recite the famous rhyme: “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.” The modern-day human’s plight can be summed up with just a little modification: “Data, data everywhere, not a byte to think.” Yes, that is what is happening, and rather fast. Bombarded with data, all kinds of data on all types of subjects, the human mind is gradually slipping into an oblivion of its own making. It is losing its ability to think and analyse, thus increasingly developing a dependence on gadgets to aid the mind to think. What is worse is that these gadgets are systematically being made a substitute for the mind. Look what is happening: Machine is learning and human mind is losing the ability to learn. That it may lead to disastrous consequences is still a subject matter of huge global debate, but the fact is that our thinking is being outsourced to the so-called intelligent machines. Resultantly, human beings are likely to become what O’Henry, had he been around, would have termed as the Banana Public drawing an analogy from his famous expression “Banana Republic”. Overdependence on these thinking devices is subjecting the brain muscles to a kind of disuse atrophy, which may lead to the same fate that strikes the other bodily muscles making them flaccid. This in all likelihood is going to affect the human mind and its thinking ability in the long run. Some glimpses can already be found with amnesia and ability to retain and recall information declining. There are people who do not even remember their mobile numbers. Even simple calculations need to be carried out with the help of mechanical devices. Such a data-induced dependence syndrome is not far off that will render the mind dysfunctional and blunt the thinking process. But it seems that in the cacophony of differing noises, no one is ready to believe that minds, if not used, can well become a vestige like the appendix.