Big Data’s Parallel Universe Brings Fears, and a Thrill - NYTimes.com

For more NYT on big data, see Rethinking Privacy in an Era of Big Data and How Big Data Gets Real

"It is perhaps time to be afraid. Very afraid, suggests the science historian George Dyson, author of a recent biography of John von Neumann, one of the inventors of the digital computer. In “A Universe of Self-Replicating Code,” a conversation published on the Web site Edge, Mr. Dyson says that the world’s bank of digital information, growing at a rate of roughly five trillion bits a second, constitutes a parallel universe of numbers and codes and viruses with its own “physics” and “biology.”
There are things going on inside that universe that we don’t know about, he points out — except when it produces unpleasant surprises, as it did during the “flash crash” of the stock market in May 2010. And we had better find out what they are."

Big Data’s Parallel Universe Brings Fears, and a Thrill - NYTimes.com