{"id":1702,"date":"2013-08-11T16:22:00","date_gmt":"2013-08-11T14:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/?p=1702"},"modified":"2013-08-18T21:59:01","modified_gmt":"2013-08-18T19:59:01","slug":"the-new-digital-age-love-it-or-hate-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theusrus.de\/blog\/the-new-digital-age-love-it-or-hate-it\/","title":{"rendered":"The new Digital Age – Love it, or Hate it"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"You might ask yourself what the book of the Google chairman Eric Schmidt has to do on a statistics blog. Well, Google’s success was based on doing the “right statistics” on the “right data” at the “right time”.<\/p>\n

And not to mention\u00a0Hal Varian (Google\u2019s Chief Economist) who said: “I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians.”<\/p>\n

In the end, Google makes its money with (our) data, and that’s the stuff statisticians used to analyze and visualize on.<\/p>\n

But let’s take a look what’s actually inside:<\/p>\n

The book consists of 7 chapters, each telling us something on the future of something – ranging from “Our Future Selves” over “The Future of States” to “The Future of Reconstruction”.
\n“Our Future Selves” is like a science fiction story, which would be fun to read, if it weren’t for the business case Google already has in mind. The reader should decide for himself\/herself whether he\/she likes to wear shoes that vibrate when you should get up from breakfast and go to work, or “drive” a driverless car, which optimizes its routes to work automatically. After all, humans are amongst other things special because they can acquire knowledge and skills, which in Schmidt’s future will be obsolete as machines and algorithms will take over.<\/p>\n

I was a bit reminded of Jacques Tati\u00a0in “Mon Oncle”, perfectly alienated, getting lost in the \u00a0optimized and engineered world of aspiring post war France:<\/p>\n