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Figure 9-29
Elements of a BI System
Metadata

BI Application

Push
BI Data BI BI BI Server “Any”
Source Application Application Device
Result Pull
BI users

• Operational data • RFM • Computer
• Data warehouse • OLAP • Mobile devices
• Data mart • Other reports • Office and other applications
• Content material • Market basket • Cloud services to anything...
• Human interviews • Decision tree
• Other data mining
• Content indexing
• RSS feed
• Expert system
BI System

How will this change by 2025? We know that data storage is free, that CPU processors are
becoming nearly so, that the world is generating and storing exponentially more information
about customers, and that data mining techniques are only going to get better. I think it likely
that by 2025 some companies will know more about your purchasing psyche than you, your
mother, or your analyst.
In fact, it may be important to ask the question: How unsupervised do we want unsuper-
vised data mining to be? Today, a data miner extracts a data set and inputs it into an unsuper-
vised data mining application for analysis. The application finds patterns, trends, and other
business intelligence and reports the results to the human analyst. The BI analyst examines the
results and possibly iterates by finding more data and running more analyses.
But what happens when BI applications become sophisticated enough to replace the BI
analyst? What happens when the unsupervised data mining application has features and func-
tions to find its own data sets and to evaluate those data sets based on the results of a prior BI
analysis? And then decides which BI analysis to perform next?
Machines work faster than humans, and they work 24/7. At some point, will machines know
so much about us that we are incapable of understanding the results? What happens when, be-
cause of complexity, such BI machines can only communicate with other BI machines?
Ray Kurzweil developed a concept he calls the Singularity, which is the point at which com-
puter systems become sophisticated enough that they can adapt and create their own software
and hence adapt their behavior without human assistance. Apply this idea to unsupervised data
17
mining. What happens when machines can direct their own data mining activities? There will be
an accelerating positive feedback loop among the BI machines. Then what will they know about us?
Is it important that at that date we will lack the capacity to know what the machines will know?
This line of thinking exposes a future flaw that runs through this text. We’ve defined information
as something possessed only by humans. If it’s on a piece of paper or on a screen, it’s data. If it’s in
the mind of a human, it is (or can be) information. When we’re talking about simple reporting opera-
tions such as grouping and filtering, and so on, that’s legitimate. But, in the day when unsupervised
data mining truly is unsupervised, machines will possess and create information for themselves.
Do you know what your data mining application is doing tonight?

17 “The Singularity Is Near,” accessed June 3, 2014, www.Singularity.com.