ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the reflections on the governmental power of Big Data. Computational scientists refer to this in terms of the '10,000 foot view' of 'the social graph' and argue that read/write technologies are just the beginning of an 'age of social machines'. Underpinning this enthusiasm for the mobilisation of social machines in collective problem solving is a form of extreme inductive reasoning in which the data 'speaks for itself' once the artificial intelligence needed to get the machines talking to one another has been engineered. Sceptics provide yet a further take on the feasibility of predictive machines for security, central to which are the possible interactions of human and machine learning and their regulation, including the design of hybrid human and machine learning approaches. Sceptics offer an altogether messier and less certain reflection on the limits to hybrid human–machine learning but one that is irreducibly driven by the humans in constituting problems of security not simply registering objective truths.
