Expressive Power of Data

The so-called Information Age that we live in is generating exabytes of data on a daily basis (1 exabyte is equivalent to 1 billion gigabytes or 1018 bytes). A 2010 article in The Economist magazine estimated that in 2005 humans had created a total of 150 exabytes of information, which was estimated to have increased to 1,200 exabytes in 2010. One of the grand challenges of our time has to be the management, storage, and handling such large amounts of data (not to mention the amount of energy this requires). While there are definite advantages to having so much data available, it is also becoming increasingly difficult to process and exploit the data. The Economist article calls it “plucking the diamond from the waste.” As the selfproclaimed philosopher of information Luciano Floridi puts it, soon we will be drowning in the age of the zettabyte (1,000 exabytes) data deluge.