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The Naked Future

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The Naked Future

What Happens In a World That Anticipates Your Every Move?

Current,

15 min read
10 take-aways
Audio & text

What's inside?

What if your phone could predict that there’s a 90% chance that you’ll like this book?

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

Patrick Tucker, editor at large of The Futurist, covers climate change, falling in love, crime, education, business, innovation, health and earthquakes. He shows how the application of big data and telemetry improve scientific predictions in each of these areas. Big data empowers corporations and governments, but it can leave the average citizen feeling powerless, digitized and under surveillance. However, Tucker demonstrates, big data also offers positive possibilities for individuals. He can be too rosy at times and he provides too little discussion of how his different topics interact, but even so getAbstract recommends his intriguing thesis to readers interested in social change, technology, cyberculture, individual autonomy or futurism.

Summary

The “Naked Future”

You’re rapidly moving toward a world in which everything about you is either known or predictable – that’s the naked future and it is brought to you by big data, which makes it possible. Big data used to mean information too vast or disparate to be useful. Now, corporations crunch big data to predict your purchases, reaching conclusions you might not want made public. This leads to general suspicion of big data and to concerns that corporations use data from personal electronic devices to make consumers into victims. That does happen, but changes in big data will empower people to push back against data users and balance any negative applications.

Telemetry

Telemetry allows sensors, cameras and apps to share data at a distance. Increasingly, items bear tags with “radio frequency identification” (RFID) that broadcast their locations continually to 24-hour tracking technology. With this, number crunchers can generate “far more accurate and personal predictions” about different aspects of your life. As manufacturers fit more objects with RFID tags, sensors and transmitters, analysts will constantly make and modify predictions.

Some predictions...

About the Author

Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. Tucker’s writing on emerging technology also has appeared in Slate, The Sun, MIT Technology Review, Wilson Quarterly, BBC News Magazine, Utne Reader and other publications.

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