Human Beings Have Been Waiting For 5000 Years. Is DT Really Amazing?

On the first weekend of March 2014, Ma Yun presented a big data industry promotion conference in Beijing: "human beings are moving from the IT era to the DT (Data Technology) era".

Alibaba's founder believes that "the future manufacturing industry needs not oil, but its biggest energy is data."

So, is data really amazing?

The historian's answer to this question is:

More than 5000 years ago, the earliest human texts were made for data. The human beings were able to enter the stable agricultural civilization from the original food gatherers, from the primitive tribes to the cities and the Wang Guohe empire.

Data is the earliest written information of mankind.

In 3500 BC - 3000 BC, in the two river basins with a straight line more than 6000 kilometers away from Beijing, the sun is shining on this fertile plain.

The Sumerians settled here developed developed agriculture and prosperous cities and towns.

Unlike hundreds of primitive tribes who live by collecting and hunting, Sumerian population in agricultural society is increasing and the site is growing.

So, Sumerians encountered a thorny problem - how to manage such a large population? How much wheat should it be? How much tax should it receive?

Human's "good memory" can not cope with these things, and can only rely on external tools.

So Sumerians pioneered the invention of a system for dealing with large numbers of data and data.

The earliest human text information is neither poetry nor story, but financial data: "29086 units of barley for 37 months".

Yuval Grali commented in his book "brief history of mankind":

If you want to manage a large country, the number can be regarded as a key.

The limitation of human brain greatly limits the scale and extent of human cooperation.

The social order of Sumerians is no longer limited by the processing power of human brain and can go to cities, kingdoms and empires.

Big data is the data that can accurately explain causes and predict trends.

The Sumerians in the southern Mesopotamia opened the age of human data.

So, what is the difference between the big data era we are exploring today and 5000 years ago? Where is the big data "big"? For ordinary people, these problems may still be stupid.

According to the questionnaire on cognition and attitude towards big data jointly carried out by DT finance and "questionnaire network", in the multiple choice questions of "big data", the number of people who choose the "National Census" is the largest. "Government financial data" and "commercial sampling data" occupy the post. However, it is considered that the "Taobao chopper" index is only the "1/4" of the national census.

The definition of big data is different, but the biggest difference between it and ordinary data is that the sample has changed from part to whole.

According to the viewpoint in the era of big data:

Big data refers to the shortcut without random analysis (sample survey), and all data are analyzed and processed.

According to this view, "commercial sampling data" is certainly not the category of big data, while "census data" is.

There is a narrow sense of big data that big data is based on user traces and can be quickly returned to the data.

This view is obviously based on the Internet era, especially the characteristics of mobile terminals.

According to this statement, only four data in the above figure, Taobao data can be called big data.

There is also a view that "small data" becomes "big".

Tu Zipei, a data expert, holds that the accumulation of small data in vertical time, or spatial records, and integrating other data can also produce value and become a holographic data of "multiple sources".

So what exactly is big data? In fact, we need not get entangled in definition, but focus on application.

The so-called "do not look at advertisements, see efficacy", big data should be able to accurately explain the reasons and predict the trend of data.

Big data everywhere, the application needs to be cautious.

The collection and application of big data is everywhere: every consumption and view of shopping website, every input of search engine, and every heading of information platform.

These recorded actions are the basic particles in the era of big data.

One of the most popular applications of big data in life is traffic big data.

For example, the 2016 Spring Festival travel forecast report released by the High German map in January 2016 predicted the degree of congestion on which high-speed road segment during the Spring Festival, and gave a detour plan.

This long time prediction requires data from previous years, and more traffic forecasts are based on the timely feedback of current traffic data.

For example, we can see the real-time location of a certain section of the vehicle, and then the system will predict the traffic flow in the next few minutes and several hours.

Accurate prediction can gain benefits or evade losses, and its value is self-evident.

Gould estimates: the use of High German map to avoid congestion function, the average monthly savings for all users up to 700 years, fuel saving up to 18 million 400 thousand liters, the value of 130 million yuan.

In addition to pportation, what areas will big data bloom in the future? According to CIC's big data industry report, education, pportation, consumption, electricity, energy, health and finance are seven major applications of big data in the world, and the total value is estimated at 32200-53900 billion US dollars.

But most of the trillions of markets are still in the mind.

Although the word "big data" has been overwhelming, mankind has not yet entered the era of big data.

Some experts believe that:

At present, the reliability of the results given by big data is too low. If we are eager to apply it to the actual situation, it is like building a bridge before we learn it well.

Government data resources should be reasonably and moderately open to society.

The Sumerian data recording system enables them to manage an increasingly complex society, and to know how many people, how much grain they produce each year, and how much tax they collect.

Since ancient times, data is an important governing rule of a city, a kingdom or even an empire.

In modern society, the public security department has a population database, and the business department has an enterprise database...

Each government department, each level government unit has its own database.

Although according to the characteristics of "user feedback", government data may not be called big data, but the massive data accumulated by government departments is the pier to build big data "cross sea bridge".

For example, the High German map, with the pport department cooperation, got the traffic department data.

However, more complaints are made about the government's control of public data and barriers to public data.

Whether the government's public data should be made public and how to make it public, people also have their own views:

Tu Zipei, a data expert, believes that the government's public data should be open as long as it does not endanger national security and does not infringe upon the privacy of citizens.

The reason is very simple. The government collects data for taxpayers' money, collecting data from taxpayers, and naturally opening to taxpayers.

But data opening is not a simple disclosure of government information. Tu Zi Pei believes that "open" and "open" are two different words:

Openness is information level, and it is one by one.

He believes that in the era of big data, data between different systems should be integrated with unified metadata definition.

The good news is that in September 2015, the State Council issued the "action plan for promoting the development of big data". The national government data unified open platform will be completed before the end of 2018. It will take the lead in the more than 20 important fields such as meteorology, environment, credit, pportation, medical treatment, health and so on, so as to realize the public data resources reasonably and moderately open to the society.

Business data sharing between enterprises is still not yet available.

As a strategic resource, oil has triggered many battles.

As Ma Yun said, data will be a more important resource than oil. What kind of struggle will it cause?

Internet giants are covying the government's big data, all want to get this huge resource.

The government also needs these internet giants' technology more and more, and is willing to cooperate with these enterprises in point to point cooperation.

But BAT enterprises themselves also have huge amounts of data resources. Are these data derived from user feedback appropriate to the public, or even shared with other enterprises?

In this regard, the public sees this:

Perhaps it is naive to want enterprises to open data resources.

Data confidentiality is a top priority for enterprises that regard data as an important resource than oil.

The domestic BAT three Internet giants have formed huge factions through continuous acquisitions.

Is the data sharing among these factions open?

I'm afraid it's also blocked.

The Journal of Finance and economics commented that:

Some scholars and professionals in the field of big data complain that there are many barriers to the sharing of big data by the government, which is difficult to share and hinders innovation from the source.

This view is reasonable, but it is not comprehensive.

Because it is difficult to explain why the domestic Internet giant who has been holding massive amounts of data has not yet excavated the task with big data technology.

Big data let privacy nowhere.

In primitive tribal society, human beings have no personal space, or even clothes, no breasts, no concept of privacy.

Even in medieval castles, nobles who still have no individualism do not know what privacy is.

They don't even have their own room, they sleep in the bright hall and live in the public eye.

Nowadays, children who are illiterate will also have their own rooms and hide their secrets.

But today, when people pay special attention to privacy, we are exposed to the Internet.

More and more behaviors of human beings are recorded by the third party: what they ate at noon, where they went at night, how many roads they had taken today, who talked with them, and even got sick.

How do people think about these recorded personal behaviors?

After that, the protection of privacy is the aspiration of the people, and the people who get the popular will get the market.

The US FBI asked the Apple Corp to help untie a suspect's iPhone5c, but Apple CEO Cook refused, or even wrote an open letter, accusing FBI of undermining the foundation of democracy and freedom in the United States (although FBI eventually asked the third party to unlock the phone).

Privacy involves not only secrets but also security.

If the general data is conventional equipment, big data is nuclear equipment.

Big data can benefit mankind like nuclear energy, or it may bring huge damage to nuclear weapons, especially when large data leakage from multiple sources is combined, and its destructive power will increase greatly.

In fact, for the government, opening public data is also facing the risk of leaking. Even if it is cooperation with technology companies, personal privacy is the easiest touches.

"Reliable" is the life of big data.

In the era of DT, big data will lead daily life, guide enterprise production, and assist the government in governing the country.

Therefore, "reliance" is the foundation of big data, and big data without data can lead the society into a wrong way.

Big data is not reliable, data sources are very important.

On the other hand, there is a need for professional data mining and analysis personnel.

Last year, LinkedIn released the 25 most popular and hottest skills in 2014, including statistical analysis and data mining skills.

The hottest talent of big data not only reflects the industry's improvement, but also reflects the current situation.

Mining the short board of analysis, and the lack of professional and professional skills is also likely to lead to distortion of big data products.

It can be expected that in the Sumerian society 5000 years ago, the talents who recorded data must be the pillars of the country.

Later, children can write numbers, mathematicians, physicists...

Mankind is now entering the era of big data, and the skills of big data will become more and more popular.

From the primitive tribes into the agricultural society, the birth of the data recording system enabled the growing human society to be effectively managed.

Today, the globalized world is faced with more complex problems -- the further growth of population, the burdened burden of resources, the continuous deterioration of the environment, and the continuous decrease of biological populations.

The original data form is hard to deal with today's and tomorrow's problems. Big data may be the solution.