What is Data and What Can it be Used For? Key Questions in the Age of Burgeoning Data-essentialism

Abstract

In this article we describe the rise of a data orthodoxy that we suggest to label ‘data-essentialism’. We question this data-essentialism by problematizing its premises, and unveil its ideological indebtedness to deeper (previous) currents in Western thought and history. Data-essentialism is the assumption that data is the essence of basically everything, and thus provides the ideological underpinnings for the imagination of creating an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that would transform the human race and our existence. The imagination of data as an essence is in contrast to, while often conflated with, ideas of data as traces we leave behind existing in highly connected societies. This confusion over what data is, and can be used for, underlines the importance to engage in questions of the nature of data, whether everything in the universe can be described in terms of data and the implications of subscribing to such a data-essentialist worldview. We connect data-essentialism to a revival of positivism, critique a belief in the objectivity of data and that predictions based on data correlations can be fully accurate. We end the article with a discussion of how some aspects of AI rely on data-essentialist accounts and how these have a history and roots in Modernity.