2. Nobody Can Agree on What Big Data Is
The number of definitions you receive when asking, “What
is big data?” is directly related to how many people you
ask. Ask 5, you get 5 answers. Ask 25, you’ll get 25.
What is generally accepted and agreed upon is that big
data is defined according to the “3 V’s” (or 4 or 5, again,
depending on whom you ask). Those are: Volume, Variety,
Velocity (and potentially, Veracity and Value).
3. Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence are Impossible
Without Big Data
You’ve likely heard the lofty (crazy?) predictions (threats?) by
tech geniuses like Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking that the
world will one day be taken over by computers. That won’t
actually happen as long as humans have power switches, but
there have been huge strides made in the field of machine
learning, also known as artificial intelligence. This is the force
behind robotics that can make assessments based on
information they have obtained (learned) previously. All of this
focus is really just big data running on data streaming tools
conducting real-time analytics. It isn’t anything like human
thought, but it is quite impressive!
4. Big Data Privacy Issues Were Around Long Before
Massive Amounts of Data
The privacy issues that keep the marketers, government
legislators, and the general public up late at night aren’t
new, either. In fact, the first questions about personal
privacy relative to the massive amounts of data collected
on people were brought up way back in 1971 by Arthur
Miller in his book The Assault on Privacy.
5. Big Data is Testing the Limits of Modern Data
Storage Capabilities
Though memory, storage capabilities, processing power,
and the entirety of the tech industry has come light-
years since 1943, big data is actually stressing the
capabilities of storage capacity today. For a
comparison, the smartphone in your pocket holds more
computing power than all of the banks of computers it
took to put man on the moon. Big data isn’t measured
in gigabytes or terabytes. It is measured in Exabyte's.
One Exabyte is the equivalent of all the data in
1,600,000,000,000 books. That is big data.