Have you seen the movie Minority Report? Well you should. Big Data and predictions is exactly the world we’re walking into. Kenneth Neil Cukier – Data Editor, The Economist and author of Big Data – A Revolution That Will Transform How We Will Work & Think, stopped by theCube at last month’s Strata event to talk Big Data with show host John Furrier (full video below).

What’s happening with Big Data and why it matters is all about the ability to dig deeper. Cukier gave three specifics:

1. Not only are we able to use more data, sometimes we’re able to get ALL of the data — get to granularities we never could before and learn new things.
2. Messy data — gone are the days of being able to only analyze the buttoned-up data.
3. Correlations, things we don’t have to answer why…just what.

With Big Data there is a new approach to business. You can take data not for primary use, but secondary uses, and reuse it and extract new forms of value. Big Data allows you to find more than just one needle in the haystack, sometimes a whole needle factory.

“Data is becoming the new form of corporate literacy. The new form of literacy, a numeracy, called Big Data,” says Cukier.

Equally interesting in listening to Cukier talk was his take on what exactly Big Data means to our generation.

“Our generation’s great infrastructure project – like we saw  with the modern techie great generation of academics that then created the Internet we’re having a new generation of Math whizzes and statistics people, machine learning, AI people creating this generation’s way to optimize the enterprise through Big Data.”

Cukier believes that what we see as deficiencies now, like the skills gap, will naturally be fixed. “We’re going to remedy this – not a problem.” What seems to be scarce now will be plentiful soon, he says. I think that his “huge land grab” analogy on how companies are collecting the data, any and all of it, furthers his point. Data, that’s where the value lies.

Towards the end of the interview, Furrier directs the questioning into what I found to be so important, I re-watched a couple times. On the impact of global data, Cukier admitted we don’t know how to measure market size in data. And who actually owns the data? You might be of the camp that “I” owns the data because “I” created it. I thought I was in that camp too, but he said something I found to be very interesting: “here’s the case for why not – it took the company the cost and the effort to actually analyze it. Just the fact I’m giving off the data isn’t the most germane after all.”

He hopes that with his book we’re able to move the ball up the pitch on the topic of Big Data and its implications on our world.  And those implications are awfully ominous. Remember the Minority Report comment I made at the beginning? One of the benefits of Big Data is that we have often treated people as a group, but with Big Data we are able to get rid of such profiling.

However a much bigger problem may be looming … propensity. In Big Data, we’re having algorithms predict what our actions will be before we actually take them. In theory, you’ll be penalized based on your propensity to do something before you’ve actually acted. “Thought crime, more likely it’s actually pre-crime like Minority Report,” said Cokier. “We’ve never had an environment where the judicial system or any administrative proceeding against us penalize us before we committed the crime or infraction.”

Big Data and prediction is exactly the world we’re walking into. I’m running late, I’m going to hurry to get downtown to work. Predictive Analytics could penalize you before you’ve actually started to be late to work.