Premieres February 24 at 10/9c on PBS
#BigDataPBS
With the rapid emergence of digital devices, an unstoppable, invisible force is changing human lives in incredible ways. Every two days the human race is now generating as much data as was generated from the dawn of humanity through the year 2003. The massive gathering and analyzing of data in real time is allowing us to address some of humanity’s biggest challenges but as Edward Snowden and the release of NSA documents have shown, the accessibility of all this data comes at a steep price. This award-winning film captures the promise and peril of this extraordinary knowledge revolution.
The film explores how the real time visualization of data streaming in from satellites, billions of sensors and GPS enabled cameras and smart phones is beginning to enable us, as individuals and collectively as a society, to sense, measure and understand aspects of our existence in ways never possible before.
Together these devices are helping create a new kind of planetary nervous system.
At the moment it's primarily governments and corporations who are focusing on Big Data. Decisions and algorithms are being put in place that are going to affect every person on earth in the near future -- but most of us are not paying attention.
Through interviews with dozens of the scientists and engineers pioneering this space, this visually stunning film captures the promise and peril in the growing revolution around big data, which is likely to have a thousand times more impact on our lives than the Internet.
