Template:Data as a self-fulfilling prophecy

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

—Miles Kington

There is, the JC freely narratises, an epochal battle raging between wisdom and technocracy which the technocrats have, for thirty years, been winning. As we are gradually immersed in the superficial charm of technology, it feels like an end-game: there is no way out for the meatware: no titanic clash, no great final conflict — just a feeble whimpering out of human expertise, finally beaten down by the irrepressible energy of the algorithm. The latest front, artificial intelligence, feels like a coup de grace the inevitable endpoint of human uselessness. Weisendämmerung: the twilight of the wise.

Wisdom only comes with time, experience and anecdotally-accumulated expertise. It is hard to acquire and expensive to buy Technocracy requires just information processing capacity and information to process. Both grow ever more abundant and cheap.

The more data you have, the more you can process, the more you can analyse and the more “insight” you can extract. But the insight it provides is necessarily derivative of the data you have actually collected, and what you have not weeded out — we must filter, format, array and frame the data to create a narrative. It only makes a picture from what we omit.

We are encouraged to judge progress in the war by reference to the quality of the data each side can muster.

Experts acquire tools to help them — digital tools — and they make us lazy, at the same time generating new kinds of metadata that the technocrats can collect. (A typed letter is an analog artefact with no metadata; a facsimile a picture of an analog artefact with a limited amount of metadata; an electronically transmitted ASCII document is only data, and has next to no analog existence at all)

And as the talent loses, we succumb to data, increasingly giving it off, great clods of it, which the technocrats then harvest and weaponise back at us in some self-fulfilling apocalyptic prophecy. No matter that the data are a historical, formalistic digital sketch of a model; that they bear no resemblance to the great ineffable, analog whole: there is no historical measure of the forward value of actions not taken, crises headed off; capital investments avoided through quick thinking and untraced application of human common sense.

The technocrats build tools to make lives easier which happen as a by-product to generate data, and then the data is all the residue that remains, not the lives made easier.

And the more data we give off, the more it emboldens the technocrats: the more it seems to be universal, and all-telling to immerse themselves in an alternative universe described by the data.