(continued) Lest all this seem a little abstract and distant from your daily life … then imagine Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other social media as electronic tattoos. They are very different from yesterday’s ink tattoos. At once trivially easy to apply as well as seemingly painless, these new tattoos can also be far longer lasting and potentially more damning.
Every time we blog, tweet, Facebook, or Google, or visit Amazon, LinkedIn, Meetup, or Foursquare, or upload a video to YouTube, we leave little marks, some more visible than others, of who we are, whom we are with, and what we like. We electronically tattoo ourselves, our preferences, our lives, in a far more comprehensive and nuanced way than any inked skin.
Mostly self-designed and self-inflicted, electronic tattoos are so easy to copy, reproduce, spread, store, and retrieve that they will likely long outlive our bodies. In a very new way, these brandings will make us immortal tomorrow … and inescapable today. Tattoos are serious. Every parent knows this; most kids do not. Once inked, a tattoo is a lifelong commitment to a culture, cause, person, passion, hatred, or love. Once inked, there is no hiding, and it is hard, if not impossible, to change sides. Tattoos publicly advertise membership, fidelity, dedication, love, hate, and--often--stupidity. Beware, Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame may now turn into an unbearable eternity.
Redirecting the Course of Evolution
Immortality and Big Data are linked in other ways as well. One of the fastest-growing, and most interesting, aspects of Big Data is at the intersection of the digital and the biological. We’ve come very far, very quickly: A decade ago, reading the code of a single genome was a historic breakthrough. This year, we will decode thousands of individual genomes. When Steve Jobs had the genes of his cancer tumor and of his normal DNA sequenced a few years ago, it was done in a specialized lab and cost more than $100,000. Today, the cost of DNA analysis has plummeted to under $10,000, and with a simple spit test sent to a lab and $299, you can have your DNA analyzed for your health and ancestry.
As we standardize, even trivialize, the coding of life--increasingly not just gene by gene, but entire genomes at a time--we will inevitably also change every carbon-based industry, including energy, medicine, chemicals, biotech, and agriculture. This may seem an outlandish claim, but imagine your reaction had someone come to you in the late 1970s or early ’80s and told you that your work, play, education, entertainment, and citizenship would be forever transformed by a worldwide web of invisible, incredibly fast wireless digital networks connected to devices smaller than your wallet or perhaps implanted under your skin.
