Technology is the great paradox of the twenty first century. While it's inarguable that it has enhanced certain aspects of our lives, it's hard to ignore the detrimental effects it can inflict on society at large. These are the stories of the future that big data is bringing to our doorsteps. The real world impact of predictions and surveillance. The power of artificial intelligence and autonomous machines. For better or worse, these are the Secrets of Big Data.
A British warship has its location mysteriously faked when its automated tracking data is compromised, sparking a tense military standoff with Russian forces in the Black Sea. An American teenager is arrested and beaten by police after parking his car in an area determined to be a hotspot for crime by a computer algorithm. A LiDar scan of the Amazon rainforest reveals several strange circular depressions on the jungle floor. An Indian woman has her livelihood destroyed by a cyclone twice in twenty years, but artificial intelligence may just prevent it from happening again.
Iran's top nuclear scientist is assassinated in a brazen daylight attack that may involve remote controlled weaponry assisted by artificial intelligence. On a quiet night in Arizona, a driverless car is out for a test drive when it fails to recognize a pedestrian in its path. At a famous auction house, a French portrait created by an algorithm goes up for sale, stoking controversy in the art world. In Japan, doctors turn to big data to diagnose a woman's illness when attempted treatments prove ineffective.
A Detroit man is arrested and dragged away in front of his family as police use facial recognition technology to arrest a suspected thief. Unable to cope with his grief, a Canadian writer creates an AI chat-bot to reconnect with a lost loved one. A London-based stock trader uses algorithms to beat the market at its own game and sets off a chain of events that threatens the stability of the world's financial markets. In Tanzania, African park rangers use new technology to identify and catch illegal hunters.
The owner of Canada's largest cryptocurrency exchange dies under mysterious circumstances while on his honeymoon in India, leaving a trail of financial devastation behind. An American woman suffering from a series of painful medical issues is denied access to prescription medication because an algorithm flags her as high risk to abuse drugs. After suffering a stroke and disappearing from the public eye for several weeks, the president of Gabon appears in a video addressing the country's citizens, but his appearance leads some people to believe that all is not as it seems to be. A humble Indian farmer is invited to participate in a program that uses artificial intelligence to improve crop yields.
The United States government suffers the largest and most intrusive cyberattack in its history and the perpetrators are believed to be a familiar Cold War foe. A young New York City job seeker engages in a series of on camera interviews where an algorithm analyses his every word and gesture to determine his suitability for employment. A Wisconsin man convicted of a petty crime has his plea deal surprisingly overturned by a judge after an algorithm determined that he was at high risk to re-offend. In India, an engineering student specializing in data science sets out to develop an application that uses artificial intelligence to translate sign language into text in real time.
A dominant Spanish badminton player uses technology in an effort to accomplish something that nobody in the sport has ever done before. An American man is wrongfully convicted of a crime based on an inaccurate lie detector test, but advances in AI may prevent this from happening in the future. As a joke, an Indonesian student offers his selfies for sale as non-fungible tokens on an internet marketplace and goes viral, earning him a small fortune in the process. An American speech pathologist teaches her dog to communicate by tapping programmed buttons, leading to a debate about whether or not artificial intelligence can be used to decode animal language.
