Alex “Sandy” Pentland pulls on to the screen a faded photograph of a group of MIT students from the 90s. While the photograph is over 20-years-old, the head-mounted contraptions that Pentland and the students are wearing share a certain similarity to a wearable device of the modern age. Gesturing towards one of the men, Pentland reveals the resemblance is no coincidence: “He became the technical lead on Google Glass.”

Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland (far left) and three students outside the MIT Media Lab in 1994. Thad Starner (third from left) went on to become the technical lead on Google Glass. Photograph: MIT

Forbes has named Pentland the grandfather of Google Glass and the Verge has called him the godfather of wearable tech, in recognition of his work imagining and realising the future of hardware. Over recent years, however, it is the field of data science that has become Pentland’s major occupation.



He has sat on the advisory boards of Google, Telefonica and the United Nations secretary general, helped create MIT’s Media Lab and chaired the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Data-Driven Development. It is no surprise then that Tim O’Reilly heralded Pentland as one of the world’s top seven data scientists in 2011. He’s in good company; the accolade is shared by the CTO of the United States and Google’s Larry Page.

In a session at the Digital Catapult in London in January, Pentland told a room of investors and startup hotshots about the untapped potential of social physics – a field that uses big data to look at how organisations and governments can learn to be more effective.

Pentland spoke about how he has used big data to track debates online. He says he has found that where the networks had the opportunity to stimulate varied debate, they have failed.

How do we bring considered, rational debate back to life? The current social media tools are killing it Sandy Pentland

He warns of the formation of social media echo chambers, in which a very limited number of viewpoints are given precedence and perpetually reiterated on sites such as Twitter. Pentland says that so many voices are given a platform that users become unable to assess the value of each and end up following a tiny number.

Speaking to the Guardian after the event, Pentland asks: “How do we bring considered, rational debate back to life? The current social media tools are killing it. That’s what the data I have suggests. It’s not a way to run a culture. That’s crowd-madness, not crowd-wisdom.”

The solution? “A simple version would be to change what it means to be plagiarist and to have a sort of automatic plagiarism detection, where if all you’re doing is copying other people’s stuff you get into trouble. That would reduce the echoes quite a lot, I think. Is that a desirable policy? Well that’s a debate.”

It’s a radical suggestion – would Pentland attempt to found a network that pursued that policy? “I am tempted to try and do that.” But he adds: “My bet is that it wouldn’t be as profitable as some of the other ones and while there would be people who would care about it, that’s a real minority.”

Solar panels and a high altitude balloon before take off in Tekapo in Southern New Zealand. Google intends to use Project Loon to bring the web to parts of the world without internet access. Photograph: GOOGLE/AFP/Getty Images

Pentland’s constructive criticism isn’t reserved solely for the social giants of the tech world.

Last year, Larry Page told the Financial Times that Google had outgrown its mission statement to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” as it invests in services such as Nest and Loon. Pentland’s proposition goes a step further:

“[At the start] Google was not a threat because they were a totally commercial operation trying to make money through ads that it served itself and okay, you can buy into that or not, but they weren’t going out and trying to change the world.

“As they go out and try to change the world, they have to revisit their ethical core because now all of a sudden they’re not just doing one function, they’re changing people’s lives in fundamental ways. They’re making it possible for other people to change their lives. They’re at a real transition point.

“I help companies like this make that transition. I sort of hate to say this but I think that the way forward is to set up separate organisations that handle data.”

I sort of hate to say this but I think that the way forward is to set up separate organisations that handle data Sandy Pentland

Illustrating how such a system would work, Pentland says: “For instance, in the United States, when I buy a car they want me to take out a loan but the organisation that I take a loan from is actually completely separate from the car manufacturer – the data does not go back and forth. They don’t know about any of the stuff I give the loan company and the loan company is regulated like a bank but the car company is not.

“Now both of them are owned by the same stockholders, OK, but there’s a real wall between them and that wall is a heavily legislated and regulated wall in the case of the bank.”

Pentland argues that the task could be implemented: “It’s plausible to do that when they get beyond just serving ads. You can imagine Nest and the IoT [internet of things] stuff all being separate.

“You could imagine what they suggested with Nest as being real so that in fact there’s a data bank, that you own your data and you contribute to that and it has the same sort of agency that a bank does where they are certifying to the government that you own your data and they are not doing things that you haven’t approved in a knowledgeable informed way. Definitely they could do that.”

Apple is extraordinarily non-transparent Sandy Pentland

While Google has experimented with these measures, Pentland calls for them to go a step further: “What they’ve done, like with Nest, is set up a little databank but they own the databank and it’s not separated out so I don’t think they’ve gotten to that. Google is a really interesting company in terms of its privacy.

“Because you can can go to Google and ask them what data do you know about me and they’ll show you everything they know, they’ll give it to you in an xml file and they’ll delete it. Can you name another company that will do that outside of a bank?”

Asked whether Google’s biggest competitor might also be willing to take a similar path, Pentland responded: “Apple is extraordinarily non-transparent and they would have potentially a lot of difficulty.”

Alex Pentland was speaking at the Digital Catapult in London, which is a founding partner of the Personal Data and Trust Network

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