I was reading Bogdan Proskurnia’s Human Intuition vs Big Computer Data when the optimism reminds me of a book called Antifragile. Written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former trader, the book fully explores the danger of modernism, and constantly reminds us that man-made complex systems are extremely vulnerable to rare but disastrous events.

According to Nassim, natural systems have been effectively tested through time, and what remains in our sights are not easily broken down by changes. For instance, even a nuclear war cannot destroy the planet wholly. Man-made systems, such as financial systems, however, have developed too rapidly during the past century. While their complexity enables errors to occur at more joints than ever, the impact of a big error could cause unprecedented damage as well. For instance, the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly caused a nuclear war, and now when a financial crisis occurs, multiple markets go down together due to globalization. He warns us that rapid development and over-reliance on new technology could become very dangerous.

This is not saying that big data, among other impactful technologies, is totally unreliable. What we need is empirical skepticism. Social sciences, unlike natural ones, produce results that more or less deviate from the Truth. For instance, economists, with various complex models,have rarely predicted financial collapse. Financial models, such as DCF and comparable multiples, employ many assumptions regarding depreciation, firm similarity, or similarity between past and present. On the one hand, the assumptions may not be entirely accurate. On the other hand, statistics cannot reflect everything in this world (it instead builds a model reflecting a real situation).

Computer performance today is astonishing, but computer intelligence still cannot match us in decision making. While holding the belief that science is our future, we must also remain eternally aware of its flaws, and withhold in us healthy skepticism at all times.

Reference: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Random House, 2012

Image source: http://www.pwc.com/en_US/us/technology-forecast/2013/issue2/features/assets/th-feature01-figure02.jpg