maxwell's demon & data wars

More information

1. Maxwell's Demon (Khan Academy video)
2. Maxwell's Demon (text explanation)
3. The Laws of Thermodynamics
4. Data the most valuable resource (Economist article)
5. Data Wars (Wired article)
6. The Great Hack (documentary)
7. Cambridge Analytica pleads guilty to breaking UK Data Laws.
8. The spectre of Cambridge Analytica still haunts African elections
9. PsyOps (Wikipedia)
10. Facebook's Unethical Emotion experiment (Guardian article)

knowledge is power

​James Clerk Maxwell, one of the 3 greatest scientists in history had a thought experiment in order to show how the 2nd law of thermodynamics - one of the supposedly immutable laws, could be violated. He imagined that a demon separated the fast moving molecules from the slow moving ones causing one side to heat up from the motion and the other side to cool down. The requirement for this theory to work however was that the demon had to have full knowledge of the system and all the molecules in it, in order to determine which were fast and which were slow and where they would be located at any given time. This idea was considered at the time nonetheless impossible because no one could know all the information. But big data and our lack of data privacy and laws has changed that and I have a theory that Cambridge Analytica (and others which surely will follow in their place) have 'cracked' this and this is one of the greatest dangers to humanity.

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