Roger Bohn is the Director of the Global Information Industry Center at the University of California, San Diego, and he is deeply concerned that we are losing the importance of knowledge in a world of such immense data. He was recently featured in this lecture at the Ideas Economy: Information Summit presented by The Economist where he gave one great example of the medical industry’s explosion of full body scans that are able to provide doctors with every last bit of information about the state of your body, but the data is so overwhelming that the professionals have no clue what to do with it. Another area where we were faced with too much data and not enough knowledge is the aviation industry. For decades, pilots were faced with an overwhelming amount of information about their plane’s status and condition in the air, but it was too much for any human brain to process or deal with. For a very long time, the result for these brave pilots was a life span of 2 years: many pilots perished because they weren’t able to process all the data they were receiving. It took the loss of many lives and many years of progress before pilots were able to wrap their heads around this information in order to make any use of it. His worry is that people jump too quickly to the conclusion that data equals knowledge. When you listen to him speak, you might just agree. You can watch the full clip at FORAtv.
