Politics of Big Data

This book offers the first in-depth examination of the political dimensions of big data – and the big data aspects of politics. The author, the Director of the Global Centre for Public Service Excellence in Singapore, suggests that the topic is one of the looming but as yet poorly understood challenges facing humanity from the ‘4th Industrial Revolution’. The ongoing digital transformation of society and the economy through emerging technologies that include robotics, artificial intelligence, and The Internet of Things will have profound political implications. This book provides the reader with a perspective on how politics and big data are, will and can interact with each other. Current enthusiasms and anxieties about big data’s potential need to be understood in broad historical context. Big data will shift the political landscape. The public, civil society, firms, politicians and bureaucrats will increasingly seek to manage the proliferating and deepening usage of Big Data. Big data, along with closely associated technologies, such as 'algorithmic decision making' (that is, accepting recommendations derived from machine learning algorithms that process the big data) shape its potential to shape, gain and contend power. The politics of big data is concerned with the power relations over data, its collection, analysis and use. The state, citizens, civil society, and business all have interests and incentives to gather use, control, influence and subvert big data. Big data is fundamentally different in scale and detail from traditional sources of knowledge. By changing the information on which policy choices are framed and resolved, it will affect, and be affected by politics. By offering unprecedented opportunities and challenges to the ways citizens and governments interact, it will alter the nature of the state and the nature of government. This study concludes that big data politics will therefore reconfigure the power dynamics of elites and shift the social contract between citizen and state.