There are many possible reactions to scientific or technological advances, but most people simplify a bit:
- Adopt a passive attitude, waiting for the benefits you can get without ‘risking’ anything.
- It is openly launched to the use of the new product or service, without the minimum precautions.
- They position themselves negatively in the face of advances, distrusting everything that sounds new, and thinking that they are going to deceive or manipulate them.
The ideal (it is obvious, but also difficult to carry out) would be to use critical thinking and, from an open and positive attitude, analyze the benefits and drawbacks, and inform yourself well and if possible through experts (in the plural, that is, , more than one) that are not an interested party, for only then to make the appropriate decisions.
One more step, as long as we think that the progress in question is positive in general terms, would be to ask ourselves what I can do to collaborate so that said progress produces improvements in society, in line with the mythical phrase of JFK, so many times adapted and reused, which says “Don’t ask yourself what your country can do for you, ask yourself what you can do for your country.”
And it is at this point where I would like to stop, because the debate that is being generated around the advances in Data Science and Big Data seems to me, like so many others, very biased and polarized. There are those who defend tooth and nail the benefits of data-based algorithms, and consider ethical and privacy problems minor evils necessary; on the contrary, others openly reject any more or less sophisticated technique that does not have a human participation or a simple interpretation, regardless of the benefits it may offer.
There are few, then, those who think: what can I do to collaborate so that the evident advance that these techniques represent is really useful for society, minimizing its negative aspects? From my point of view, certain attitudes would go along this line:
- Promote open data, what is called “open data”. This is an area in which governments and institutions play a more important role than ordinary citizens. Providing data for its exploitation by the research community, with due anonymization precautions, contributes to transparency and reduces the disadvantage that this group has with respect to large corporations that can access data by other means and use it on their own. interest.
- Be honest in surveys. I recognize that this is an opinion based on my own experience and not empirically verified, but I believe that in general the public (at least in Spain) tends not to take seriously their participation in surveys and polls (perhaps because most are commercial and uncomfortable ), ruling out participating or providing answers that are not always true. This circumstance makes it difficult to draw reliable conclusions from these studies.
- Respect our privacy (and that of others). And it is that sometimes we make errors of bulk without realizing it, surely influenced by these times where immediacy and the absence of pause and reflection rule. We share hoaxes and false news “just in case”, we dump our whole lives on social networks and messaging applications, we send unnecessary emails without really paying attention to the recipients … and thus we could continue citing small and innocent security breaches that we are creating in our day to day, but in the long run they can lead to serious problems.
- Be consistent: you can’t make a profit without risking. Everyone understands that to obtain high returns (on the stock market or in any other investment) you have to take certain risks. Something similar happens with technological advances: we all like that satellite navigation systems direct us to our destination as quickly as possible; Well, for this the devices need to know our location. Obviously, we have to know to what extent we are willing to give up our privacy to take advantage of it, and of course have all the necessary information and have accepted the corresponding conditions. But it is utopian to pretend that without any kind of assignment we will be able to benefit.
- Get trained and informed. Just as it is convenient to have certain notions of economics to deal with some of our daily obligations, such as contracting insurance, mortgages or pension plans, it would be desirable that some basic knowledge of probabilities and statistics were much more common, so that we fell with less frequent in crude manipulations that are too easily presented to us by skewed data and graphs.
- Weight the news in its proper measure. Sometimes we draw conclusions based on cases that are published in the media, without realizing that, precisely for this reason, they tend to be exceptional, and do not respond to a generalized or majority situation.
In short, as we said at the beginning, the recipe is ‘simple’: common sense, critical thinking, and an extra dose of scientific training.
Manuel Terrádez Gurrea Collaborating professor in the Master in Business Intelligence and Big Data Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications Studies Open University of Catalonia
