A new window on the world has opened. Professor Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), compares this mass instrumentation of human behavior to another historic breakthrough in scientific observation. “The microscope, invented four centuries ago, allowed people to see and measure things as never before—at the cellular level,” said the New York Times, explaining Brynjolfsson’s perspective. “It was a revolution in measurement. Data measurement is the modern equivalent of the microscope.” But rather than viewing things previously too small to see, now we
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