The Peril of Knowledge Everywhere

By QUENTIN HARDY, NYT
May 10, 2014, 1:16 pm

Thanks to advances in technology, we may soon revisit a question raised four centuries ago: Are there things we should try not to know?

That’s because the collection of data is increasing, in both scale and type, at a phenomenal rate.

IBM says that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day. That is a number both unimaginable and somewhat unhelpful to real understanding. It’s not just the huge scale of the information, after all, it’s the novel types of data (incidental photographs stored in the cloud, for example, or requests to Google for driving directions) that governments, corporations, and individuals gain access to for all sorts of purposes.

Take Jetpac, a mobile app that uses some of the 60 million photos a day stored on Instagram to create visual guides to over 6,000 cities worldwide. So if you’re looking for hipsters in San Francisco, for example, its algorithms can identify by location the incidence of mustaches in snapshots, and determine (are you ready for it?) that the Mission neighborhood is a good place to try. Sounds like fun.

(More here.)