It is fairly evident in our modernized society that humanity is in control of its own development and how people choose to help one another. Selim Jahan discusses global development being in the hands of the people, by the people, and for the people to make the point that everyone must actively work at achieving global development and personal freedoms. Yet, global development and personal freedoms is far from an easy issue to negotiate, and even with tools like data science, there is an intense layer of complexity to such widescale problems.
With regard to our success so far, we’ve done decently. Many countries that have sufficiently developed and their citizens have equal access to these freedoms and developments are in very good shape. However, there is still a vast majority of countries, and arguably even the “developed” ones because it seems impossible to ever reach a fully developed state, that need aid in progressing societal, economic, security, etc. freedoms. Many larger nations have involved themselves with outreach to lesser developed countries, yet an overbearing focus upon economics and prosperity has begun to wash over the entire process.
One of the most powerful tools we have now to fast-track the growth of the human condition is data science. The capability of data science is the ability to identify what is causing the roadblocks towards human development and to suggest areas of improvement. As Amartya Sen goes into a deep discussion of in Development as Freedom, the whole idea of human development hinges around the idea of freedoms to the people. By utilizing data science, it becomes significantly easier to compare and contrast nations and what they are lacking to improve their condition. Sen backs the argument as well that while GNP and prosperity play an important role in gaining freedoms, it is far from the only necessary factor. Going along with this ideology, one could use data science to look into a nation’s specific conditions and identify what sets them apart from another further developed country. Then from their the specifics of targeting those issues begin, but the first step is being able to fully comprehend the problem; the current view of poverty being the sole unfreedom to the human condition neglects all civil rights, political freedoms, rights to protection, and more.
Complexity is perhaps the most substantial opponent in obtaining freedoms. Civilization possesses the means to fix almost any problem around the world, but figuring out what the real means to do so are, and even overshadowing that, what problems to target in the first place, represents the true difficulty. An exemplary showcase of this is Owen Barder’s reviews on the antiquated economic models predicting future growth. In response to the Harrod-Domar model which states growth is reliant upon the amount of capital and the amount of labor, Barder is diatomically opposed and claims the whole process is far more complicated and reliant on a significantly wider range of variables and conditions. Due to the sheer number of components in human development and freedoms, it’s theoretically impossible to develop a global format for achieving them, which means that each condition must be analyzed separately, but still with the information from the others in mind.
One reasonable question to the development process is whether data science will really be all the tools we need to identify the global hindrances, unfreedoms, and obstacles to the human condition. This is certainly a fair position to take and to overlook some of the downfalls of data science itself would be a mistake. Data science is naturally only as good as the quality of the data is. However, as we may need to develop new specific techniques for aggregating data, we will be able to process it still and use the practices of data science to target the adversity to developing the human condition.