Vagueness does not a vision make

I read brain-dead nonsense all the time on the Web and never write about it. I recognize doing so would be a colossal waste of my (and your) time. However, when I pay for the privilege of reading it, that's another matter. So here's a big raspberry to the New York Times for printing the meaningless nonsense that is Georges Nahan's essay "New Tools for New Computing Challenges".

As far as I can tell, Nahan sees "big data" as a challenge for current software and the current Internet. Well, duh. Let me be the first to break the news to him that this has been true for at least a decade. Where has he been? (It has been true of data in the nonvirtual world for far, far longer, by the way: witness the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the most visible failure of data mining and data sharing just in the past decade.)

What's Nahan's prescription to address this challenge? Beats me. All he can muster is palaver like this:

It is likely that software will become more “responsible,” able to make decisions on the fly to contain threats to the entire Web ecosystem. We can also expect smarter, content-aware network technologies to emerge to further ease these threats. Everything will increasingly happen in real time, increasing the need for robust and responsive systems for reputation management and trust. These systems will rely mainly on software algorithms, augmented by online collective human judgment.

What kind of "decisions on the fly"? How will "content-aware network technologies" "ease these threats"? How is today's Internet and software not "real time"? And what a revolutionary concept, "software algorithms ... augmented by online collective human judgment" -- why, I wish someone would apply it to existing problems. Oh wait, they do: it's how most spam is filtered by the big email providers. In fact, it's how they've been filtering spam for years.

The whole essay is of a piece with the almost-complete paragraph I quoted. It's a load of puff pastry without any filling. Or, to borrow from Gertrude Stein, there's no there there.

To be generous to Nahan, it would be impossible to provide detailed answers in a short piece like this ... but the editor(s) knew that. Why, then, did he, she, or they let Nahan tackle what was obviously an unsuitably broad topic that could only result in a content-free piece?

Even if the contributor is interested in writing such arrant nonsense, I expect better editorial judgment than to publish it.