The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move?

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, March 2014: In the film Minority Report (based on a Philip K. Dick novel), Tom Cruise works in a police unit that predicts murder, stopping killers before they're able to bring harm against their victims. But one of the overlooked features of the movie is its environment, a near-future full of ads personalized to each person. According to Patrick Tucker's The Naked Future: What Happens in a World that Anticipates Your Every Move?, that scenario has already arrived. Decisions made by governments, companies, and individuals are already based on learnings from predictive analytics. Big data can help curb climate change, isolate epidemics, prevent crime, and allocate resources during natural disasters. On the personal level, we can use data to understand our own health, our friends and family, and even the people we may fall in love with one day. If there's a central lesson to take from Tucker, a deputy editor of The Futurist magazine, it's not that we should resist the data points being collected about our lives, but simply to be mindful of them. "We want our apps to know us, to present customized answers to our problems and questions, but we don't care how they arrive at those solutions until there's a problem." To Tucker, the use and abuse of big data is inevitable, but we can take steps to understand exactly where it's going and how it affects us. The Naked Future is accessible (sometimes a little hokey, even), but Tucker has penned a big data book that can be understood by both technophiles and luddites alike. --Kevin Nguyen