Over the next 30 years, the great work will be parsing all the information we track and create—all the information of business, education, entertainment, science, sport, and social relations—into their most primeval elements. The scale of this undertaking requires massive cycles of cognition. Data scientists call this stage “machine readable” information, because it is AIs and not humans who will do this work in the zillions. When you hear a term like “big data,” this is what it is about.

