Big Data: The New Replicators

Big Data: The New Replicators

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins may never have envisioned the current era of Big Data, but their shared fundamental principle – “all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities” – may also apply to the new exponential proliferation of 1’s and 0’s in the digital universe. Is there any reason why data – just like ideas, fashions, behaviors, catch-phrases and other mind memes – can not also replicate and evolve, actively looking for ways to propagate themselves in the world? Viewed from this perspective, our computers and digital devices are nothing more than “survival machines” for Big Data — a mechanism for individual bits of data in the primordial soup of human knowledge to transmit themselves to future generations.