2020 will be remembered in history not only for the tumultuous series of events and challenges it posed but also as a significant period of change in all of our lives. Across the world, due in no small part to COVID-19, we have witnessed the broad and rapid digitalization of most spheres of life, from the professional to the personal.
On September 4th 2020, WEDF's John Marshall gave an introductory talk at London Tech Week's Ethical Data Festival entitled "The Problem of Data". A non-technical survey, this is a direct transcription of a talk that explored the scope and nature of some of the issues around data. Implicating the entire knowledge economy, and embracing ‘fake news,’ media narratives, and the impact of social media quite as naturally as considerations of bias in data analytics or AI, the issues are non-obvious and may in fact be the most important of our age.
