I revealed earlier how my 30-year-old story "Snow" predicted miniature flying drones capable of recording thousands of hours of a particular subject's life, and called (as at least one current model is) a Wasp. I am absolutely (not) certain I was the first.
Now here's an article on Big Data and how we are to begin to understand the quasi-physics and quasi-biology of digital information increasing at the rate of 5 trillion bits a second, and how that understanding will produce, or require, a new set of laws of human behavior. Hari Seldon is referenced, naturally, but a more pertinent picture was in my 1989 story "In Blue," which posited a number of new analytic tools (coincidence magnitude calculation, the differential social calculus, act-field theory) with which wise social engineers could enter and be usefully influenced by the universal data stream. I didn't then own a computer and knew nothing about them, which of course does not inhibit the true prophet. The fact that my analytics were entirely imaginary is no drawback either, surely.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/science/big-datas-parallel-universe-brings-fears-and-a-thrill.html?ref=science
Now here's an article on Big Data and how we are to begin to understand the quasi-physics and quasi-biology of digital information increasing at the rate of 5 trillion bits a second, and how that understanding will produce, or require, a new set of laws of human behavior. Hari Seldon is referenced, naturally, but a more pertinent picture was in my 1989 story "In Blue," which posited a number of new analytic tools (coincidence magnitude calculation, the differential social calculus, act-field theory) with which wise social engineers could enter and be usefully influenced by the universal data stream. I didn't then own a computer and knew nothing about them, which of course does not inhibit the true prophet. The fact that my analytics were entirely imaginary is no drawback either, surely.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/05/science/big-datas-parallel-universe-brings-fears-and-a-thrill.html?ref=science
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crowleycrow- John Crowley
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Isn't the problem with the stock market these days that they think they have solved the problem of the human factor in trading only to find the human factor then takes a surprise right turn and runs off a cliff or was never behaving in the manner they assumed. As Asimov himself observed in Foundation and Empire an unpredictable yet significant individual can completely skew things.
I bought a copy of "Otherwise" for Kindle and have been rereading "The Deep". Sadly, the text is marred by a large number of typos, or more likely 'scannos' -- it's hard to believe that any human being would mistype "the" as "me" and "die", among others. Distracting. Clearly, the Kindle "Otherwise" was never proofread by anyone who loved it. (And it's not just this one book; I see frequent dumb errors in most ebooks transcribed from older books.)
It'd be nice if publishers could somehow put the source text for ebooks up in the cloud somehow, so readers who care can find and fix the errors. I don't know how it could be done without allowing everyone and his dog to download copyrighted works for free; nor do I think that you personally have the clout to make Amazon change their model. But maybe authors collectively can think of some ways to improve the quality control for ebook distribution of your works; I'm sure you must have the desire.
More signs of strained seams in the Matrix. What was to be perfect replication is not. Humans can know it but machines can't. Maybe better in future, or maybe we will (like medieval monks reading copied manuscripts) just learn to accept a certain level of inane errors and unintelligible tangle.