Asking the Question is Half the Right Answer

If you start talking to me about the future, you'll quickly realize that John Connor, despite being fictitious, is one of my personal heroes. Of course, anyone who saves humanity from an offending outside force, be it machine, alien, demon, or zombie, should be universally well-respected. As human beings, we're happy to destroy one another, but theoretically take great offense to some other form of being trying to fill that role. We really are one big family.

Why John Connor? Well, as much as I appreciate all the other fictional heroes out there that have saved humanity, I'm quite certain that the Terminator doomsday scenario comes closest to reality, and may in fact be far too prophetically accurate for comfort. Thus, we can learn more from John Connor and repeated viewings of the Terminator franchise than from just about any other medium that portrays humanity's struggle for survival. Update your Netflix queue accordingly.

My trepidations about the coalescence of developing artificial intelligence and the ubiquity of the internet aside (i.e. a technological singularity), as a global society we have been hurtling into the future with technology developing at a truly exponential rate, as Ray Kurzwell demonstrates aptly in a recent TED presentation. One of the more glaring results of the ongoing technological progress in which we find ourselves immersed is the overabundance of information that anyone with an internet connection should be well aware of. With a few strokes of a keypad we're able to find the answer to almost any routine question we could conjure. It sure beats going to the library to pour through the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

This information overload has spawned the new field of data visualization. Faced with enormous amounts of data that cannot realistically be read and understood in the traditional sense, there has been an increasing effort to convert this data into charts, graphs, interactive displays, and supergraphics that will allow users to comprehend the significance of the information being synthesized, compressed, and displayed. As we continue to amass more and more information, the manner in which we convey this data will continually evolve in such a way that considers technological capability, human psychology, and artistic appeal.

The implications for our society's growing data obsession are innumerable and unpredictable. It may one day bring world peace or may instead convert humanity into an enslaved race of human-machine hybrids, much like the Borg, who's to know? Nevertheless, it is obvious that this trend has and will continue to shape how we think. The traditional process of discovery where one asks a question and then must engage in the work of finding the answer has been turned on its head.

Collectively, we have the data to answer an overwhelming amount of questions, and while our methods of harvesting this data are in their infancy, they will no doubt progress at the typical exponential pace of technology. Where we are sorely lacking is in our ability to ask the right questions.

Without asking the right questions we cannot put our plethora of information to work. Information for the sake of information is not only useless, its obnoxious. In the context of public health, something I think about from time to time, disease rates, lab results, and health outcomes are meaningless until that data is put to use improving population health. Questions provide the framework for making information work for us. Without asking the right questions we might as well be building a brick house on quicksand.

So the question remains: is "what are the right questions?" the right question to ask?