For the full story on Stephen Cohen's Wired Talk on Big Data and algorithms: http://bit.ly/QI9wTp
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The robot apocalypse isn't coming, according to Palantir's Stephen Cohen: "Don't hire a computer to do a human's job," he advised at Wired 2012. "In the 21st century we're going to see the algorithm rise to do more than it's ever done before, but it won't do what it can't do."

Cohen works with big data, analysing vast quantities of data to find new connections that can help everything from tracking down the culprits in drug crime to identifying signs of financial fraud. He emphasised that no matter how sophisticated an alogorithm may be, "humans are of a greater order than algorithms".

The key feature of an algorithm, Cohen says, is that it "is nothing more or less than a plan where there is no ambiguity in its execution -- it lets machines execute the idea behind an algorithm easily". The difference between an algorithm and a human is that a human can hesitate, and understand the qualitative facts at hand -- an algorithm deals purely in quantitative data.

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Stephen Cohen on Big Data | WIRED 2012 | WIRED
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