Parts per billion, paranoid CT scans, and too much information

Could the information age drive us crazy with too much data?

I don’t just mean too many emails, cell phone calls, direct mail offers from credit cards, and data about Tom Cruise’s latest girlfriend– I mean about stuff that basically matters. Threat assessment data is being collected at an unprecedented rate and level of accuracy – but will it make us jump at shadows?

Let me be specific. An interesting discussion at my house last night tied together a lot of things I’ve been wondering about threat assessment in the future. My fiancee, a first-year doctor of internal medicine at the University of Maryland hospital, began complaining about the abuse of the “Whole Body Scan.” You see, people go out and get an extremely detailed scan of every possible clot, tumor, occlusion, and absess in their entire body. Many of these imperfections are the kinds of things that happen every day in the human body. Most would never have resulted in disease. Now, a spooked patient comes in and wants lots of invasive, possibly complicating biopsies, tests on everything under the sun.

For sure, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure…most of the time. But what cost is it to the healthcare system if we now have to check everything that might even look like a disease marker? Will doctors be stuck jumping at shadows? My fiancee and her colleagues are a bit wary of too much information.

Now this reminds me of a recent talk by fellow futurist Jerry Glenn, the executive director of the United Nations University Millennium Project. His recent unveiling of this year’s State of the Future revealed a fascinating conundrum in the world of environmental protection. Apparently, the development of hyper-powerful sensors is giving scientists the ability to sense pollution in the parts-per-billion. For example, you could discover that you’ve got a couple parts-per-billion of arsenic in your apartment.

Now here’s the problem: So what? This new, super-sensitive data collector may not tell us anything more useful about the danger, but it can sure scare you into thinking that your apartment is a toxic waste site. Maybe a secondary impact of all this data is it will make the environmental watchdogs seem even more hyperbolic about potential threats.

To me, this all ties together with the demands on today’s decision makers. We live in a world where everyone is trying to assess threats — Do those guys have WMDs? Is that company entering my market with a better product? Have I got lymphoma? Is that creepy guy following me to my car?

We live in a time where we crave data about threat assessment, but once we find ways to collect it, what are our strategies to create wise plans of action? That’s the trick.