Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations

by Thomas L. Friedman

There was not a belief in the traditional engineering community that the data had much to offer. They used the data to verify their physics models and then act upon them. The new breed of data scientists here say: ‘You don’t need to understand the physics to look for and find the patterns.’ There are patterns that a human mind could not find, because the signals are so weak early on that you won’t see them. But now that we have all this processing power, those weak signals just pop out at you. And so as you get that weak signal, it now becomes clear that it is an early indication that something is going to break or is becoming inefficient.” In the past, the way we detected weak signals was with intuition, added Ruh. Experienced workers knew how to process weak data. But now, with big data, “with a much finer grain of fidelity, we can make finding the needle in the haystack the norm”—not the exception.