New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

by James Bridle

In a 2008 article in Wired magazine entitled ‘End of Theory’, Chris Anderson argued that the vast amounts of data now available to researchers made the traditional scientific process obsolete.5 No longer would they need to build models of the world and test them against sampled data. Instead, the complexities of huge and totalising data sets would be processed by immense computing clusters to produce truth itself: ‘With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.’ As an example, Anderson cited Google’s translation algorithms, which, with no knowledge of the underlying structures of languages, were capable of inferring the relationship between them using extensive corpora of translated texts. He extended this approach to genomics, neurology, and physics, where scientists are increasingly turning to massive computation to make sense of the volumes of information they have gathered about complex systems. In the age of big data, he argued, ‘correlation is enough. We can stop looking for models.’