Look at something like cooking. Now, you would hear a lot about smart kitchens and augmented kitchens. And what do those smart kitchens actually do? They police what's happening inside the kitchen. They have cameras that distinguish ingredients one from each other and that tell you that shouldn't mix this ingredient with another ingredient.

As economic life relies more and more on the Internet, the potential for small bands of hackers to launch devastating attacks on the world economy is growing.

In business, standards establish the rules of the game, creating path dependencies as investments are made and corresponding designs are set in stone and plastic. Inferior standards can prevail due to smart marketing or industry collusion.

The great temptation of Big Data is that we can stop worrying about comprehension and focus on preventive action instead. Instead of wasting precious public resources on understanding the 'why' - i.e., exploring the reasons as to why terrorists become terrorists - one can focus on predicting the 'when' so that a timely intervention could be made.

It's true that virtually all new technologies do trigger what sociologists would call 'moral panics,' that there are a lot of people who are concerned with the possible political and social consequences, and that this has been true throughout the ages.

Cloud computing is a great euphemism for centralization of computer services under one server.

Social media's greatest assets - anonymity, 'virality,' interconnectedness - are also its main weaknesses.