The Naked Future
What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move?
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
“A thorough yet thoroughly digestible book on the ubiquity of data gathering and the unraveling of personal privacy.” —Daniel Pink, author of Drive
Thanks to recent advances in technology, prediction models for individual behavior grow more sophisticated by the day. Whether you’ll marry, commit a crime or fall victim to one, or contract a disease are becoming easily accessible facts. The naked future is upon us, and the implications are staggering.
Patrick Tucker draws on fascinating stories from health care to urban planning to online dating. He shows how scientists can predict your behavior based on your friends’ Twitter updates, anticipate the weather a year from now, figure out the time of day you’re most likely to slip back into a bad habit, and guess how well you’ll do on a test before you take it.
Tucker knows that the rise of Big Data is not always a good thing. But he also shows how we’ve gained tremendous benefits that we have yet to fully realize.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Every time we swipe a debit card or a subway card, activate our GPS, or post on Facebook from our phones, we leave an electronic trail for others to follow. According to the Futurist magazine's deputy editor Tucker, each of us now creates 1.8 megabytes of data a year using our devices in such ways. Thanks to the wonders of telemetry the transmission of measurements of data we are now on the edge of a world in which individuals and collective agencies will be able to use our data to predict many aspects of our lives. In this fascinating and gripping book, Tucker illustrates how such predictive powers will tell us about our personal health before we know it and how that health will affect others, where and when a crime might happen and who might become a victim of a crime, and when you might fall in love. As much as we wish to retain our privacy, even when using these devices, the future in which we stand naked to the world is closer than we imagine, according to Tucker.
