Late-comer advantage in the age of big data
? The only source of human knowledge is the recording and organizing of past experience, and data, is the carrier of this recording, so the value of data lies first and foremost in the fact that it is the source of knowledge. If traditional data is the source of part of human knowledge, then with the expanding scope of human records, big data in the modern sense will gradually become the source of all human knowledge.
Data is the measurement and record of the objective world, and this record is also the record of history and reality. 1869, when U.S. President Garfield modernized the U.S. census system, he found that the data not only contains the laws of social development, but also provides a completely new way of writing history:
Until now, historians have been using a general form of study to study the history of the world. Until now, historians have studied a country in a general form, they can only tell us about the history of emperors and generals and wars, but they cannot say much about the growth of the people themselves, the various forces, the details, and the laws of each life in our huge society. It makes new historical records possible.
In retrospect, this is very forward-looking. As humanity leaps into the age of big data, data is not only a source of new knowledge, it is also the most important, most reliable, and best way to record history. From now on, all of mankind's historical records, whether they are numbers, documents, pictures, or audio and video, will exist in the form of data; data is static history, and history is dynamic data. The fragments of history are the stray data; the fog of history is the fuzzy data; the blind spot of history is the missing data. History constructed with data is always alive because of the precise details, and the richer the data, the better historians of later generations will be able to reproduce the society of that time through the data.
In addition to discovering knowledge and recording history, this book argues that the pinnacle form of human use of data is to train machines to gain intelligence through data, and that in the not-too-distant future, ubiquitous computing devices and networks will work and serve humans like people with intelligence. This means that we are moving towards an intelligent society. In this new form of society, due to accurate calculation and prediction, all parts of the whole society can be interlocked like countless large and small bearings and gears, with their teeth matching each other, daily management will be optimized through data, various tasks and cooperation can be seamlessly connected, and the cost of social operation can be greatly reduced, and more importantly, more and more work will be be replaced by computers or robots. This is both progress and challenge. Looking back to the agricultural and industrial eras, human beings have continuously developed the natural environment on which we depend for survival, from the surface to the ground, physical resources will be exhausted one day, and big data will become an inexhaustible new resource for human beings, on top of this resource, and then through software and algorithms, human beings will build an intelligent world.
Data is becoming the most important soil and foundation of this world.
At this critical juncture of social transformation, China, as a developing country that is catching up with developed countries, will be given unprecedented opportunities by history. For example, while it took decades of effort to establish a universal credit system in the United States back then, today, Alibaba can decide whether to issue a loan in just a few minutes because of its mastery of customers' transaction flow data. Utilizing the ubiquitous abundance of data, China's universal credit system may be established in a shorter period of time and at a smaller cost. Another example is that with the popularization of the Internet, credit cards will be data-driven and virtualized, and physical credit cards will be drastically reduced or even disappear, which means that our banks won't have to build as many physical outlets and automatic teller machines as American banks. Then again, because of the emergence of intelligent online education platforms, future educational resources will not be limited to steel and concrete schools at all, and the problem of China's tight educational resources may be quickly and dramatically alleviated. In addition, the emergence of wearable computer devices, intelligent software diagnostic systems, telemedicine and other technologies will ease the shortage of medical resources and professionals.
All these opportunities can be summarized as a latecomer's advantage.
Take the bank's automatic teller machine as an example. As can be seen from the table below, the number of ATMs owned by China has been increasing rapidly in recent years. In 2012, China's average number of ATMs per 100,000 adults was 37.51, but compared with developed countries such as Britain, the United States, Japan, Canada and so on, our gap is still very large: Canada's average number of ATMs per 100,000 adults was 205, the United States was 173, Japan was 127. If we want to narrow and level this gap in terms of data, China will certainly need many years of hard work. However, thanks to the emergence and popularization of big data and Internet finance, most financial transactions can be completed through virtual accounts. It is foreseeable that the future society must not need so many physical ATMs. If we can base on the long-term and scientific planning now, we can cross the link of building these ATMs and save the corresponding costs, which is the advantage of latecomer.
Before and after 2001, Mr. Yang Xiaokai, an economist of Chinese descent, once suggested that if China only focuses on technology imitation and neglects system construction, the late-coming advantage may be transformed into a late-coming disadvantage, but I think the late-coming advantage that we have now does not belong to this category. The late-comer advantage now appears because mankind is taking a big step from industrial civilization to information civilization, because of the impact of big data and the arrival of intelligent society, there are some new methods on the horizon of mankind to solve some old problems, and these methods use not steel and cement, but software and data!
But it is not easy to grasp this latecomer advantage in global competition. Competition between countries is ostensibly a scientific and technological competition, economic competition, but in the final analysis, it is still the competition of national quality and culture. Without a healthy, rational and up-to-date culture, it is difficult for a country to become powerful. The effort of this book is an attempt to turn data, a scientific and technological symbol, into a cultural symbol, and big data, a topic of high-end elites, into a popular topic in China, so as to make the data culture enter into the vision of the Chinese people, and integrate into the consciousness and blood of the Chinese people.
In the face of rounds and rounds of technological waves, the governments of the world (including developed countries in Europe and the United States) are actually very slow to respond. Information technology has developed to such an extent that it is no longer pushing society forward, but pulling it forward. As mentioned earlier, the various supporting facilities and control provisions of society today have lagged behind the development of information technology, and for all the energy of technology to be released, society must rebuild its own infrastructure and control system. Looking back at the Gilded Age and Progressive Era of the United States, it was in the transition from an agrarian society to an industrial society that the United States seized the opportunity at the right time, and not only succeeded in resolving the social crisis of the time, but also realized the rise of a great power. Now a new social form is approaching us again, and at this turning point, strategic choices are particularly important for any country, with no greater responsibility and challenge than the government.
But the building and progress of any nation cannot be left entirely to the government. Without the mobilization of the entire society, without real citizens, the progress of the country will lack long-term motivation, and its progress can only rely on external stimulus and external drag, the result is: to follow the developed countries behind the same step. In the thousands of years of feudal dynasties in Chinese society, there is no lack of such examples and lessons. Citizens, countless citizens, are the driving force behind a society's progress. For decision-makers in Chinese society, it is crucial to realize that the energy of new technologies will upset the balance of power, and that some new, callable resources have emerged outside the traditional boundaries, and that there must be new ideas and new means of integrating and calling upon these resources.
Change, does not necessarily mean progress, but progress, must require change. We look forward to more progress and change in China. This depends on the government, it depends on the Chinese public, and it depends on China's cultural innovation.
Data, since ancient times, census, agricultural statistics, military wars, political calculations data, although small, but helps to rule the country. The reason why the United States is so prosperous, the data culture is firmly rooted is one of the main reasons.
In the era of information explosion, interconnectivity, smart cities, big data, and more to sweep the world with the momentum of the mountains and the mountains, government governance, business gold, the public want to fairness and justice, big data has been given a new historical mission.
In the book "Top of the Data", from the small data era to the rise of big data, the author with a grand view of history, culture, big data, giving us a panoramic picture of data science, wisdom and culture. The whole book starts from the foundation of America's founding, and by elaborating on the characteristics of the Primary Counting Era, the Civil War Era, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the Sampling Era, and the Big Data Era, the book systematically combs through the formation of America's data culture, elaborates on its way of ruling the country with data, discusses the weaknesses of China's data culture, and looks forward to the vision of the future data world.
Respecting facts, speaking with data, esteeming knowledge and rationality, and innovating with data, the author not only intends to pass on the payload of Huang Renyu's numerical management, but also tries to transform data, a scientific and technological symbol, into a cultural symbol in China, and to form a cultural discourse system.
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