- Documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis recently appeared on current affairs podcast Talking Politics.
- The celebrated producer shared his views on the rise of 'big data' among governments and businesses.
- Curtis suggested the idea that data can be used to predict anything is 'a complete myth.'
- See more stories on Insider's business page .
Documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has warned against the use of "big data" in corporate and government decision-making, suggesting its predictive powers have been overblown.
Appearing on current affairs podcast Talking Politics , Curtis expanded on some of the themes raised in his recent series for the BBC, "Can't Get You Out of My Head" , in which he deploys his trademark combination of stock footage and a haunting, alternative soundtrack to weave together stories of individualism, populism, technology, and conspiracy theories in the modern world.
"The best metaphor for it is that Amazon slogan, which is: 'If you like that, then you'll like this,'" Curtis told host and Cambridge University academic David Runciman .
"It's always looking at patterns from the past. In a way it's a sort of modern ghost story," he added. "What you get through your screen, suggested to you everyday, is things based upon patterns of your own past behavior, compared to the patterns of past behavior of millions of other people ... It traps you in that room with those people, and it never offers you a door out of it."
Despite these algorithms requiring huge amounts of people's data for input, Curtis is skeptical that this provides much real insight into human behavior.
"The underlying thing, which I do try and question at the end of the films ... is that idea that what they call 'big data' can predict the future is a complete myth," he continued.
Curtis backed his case with reference to politicians' and journalists' collective historical failures to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union , the 2008 financial crisis , Brexit , and the election of Donald Trump .
Going further, he pointed to the US National Security Agency's failure to intercept a single terrorist attack , despite monitoring the communications of millions of Americans for the better part of two decades.
Turning to the power of big data in Silicon Valley, he added that the online ad model has "generated vast amounts of cash, I mean, trillions of dollars, which those companies are sitting on and not actually investing in the economy at all with, because they use it as a weapon to buy up anything that threatens their monopolies, and just bring them into their system.
"I think the next scandal that's waiting to break is that, actually, a lot of this might be a scam."
This is Curtis' opinion, but there has been speculation for some time that the somewhat opaque online advertising industry, which underpins the business models of tech giants like Google and Facebook, could be a bubble waiting to burst .
"It's a bit like sending someone with a flyer advertising pizzas to the lobby of a pizza restaurant," said Curtis. "You give each person one of those flyers as they come into the restaurant and they walk out with a pizza.
"It looks like it's one of your flyers that's done it. But it wasn't – it's a pizza restaurant."
You can listen to the latest episode of Talking Politics with Adam Curtis here . You can learn more about his six-part BBC series "Can't Get You Out of My Head" here .
Via PakApNews