I spent last week enjoying the Cassandra Summit, so much that I did not take the time to write a blog post. I had a few ideas but I chose quality over quantity. That being said, something interesting happened at the summit: we coined the term “augmentation” for one of my companies key go to market use case, instead of data layer modernization or digitalization. even got the opportunity to try both terms to the different people visiting our booth. In this extremely small sample, people really tended to have a much better degree of understanding when I used the word augmentation, which got me thinking. I even read a very interesting article from Tom O’Reilly called: Don’t Replace People. Augment Them. in which he argues against technology fully replacing people. Could this concept of augmentation be applied in a broader scale to understand our data technology trends? Maybe, at least that’s what I’m going to try to lay out in this article.

Technological progress relies on augmentation.

That’s the first thing that struck me when I pondered on augmentation in our world, and more specifically when it comes to software. At the exception of very few, the platforms, apps and tool that we use are all based on augmentation of existing basic functions: Amazon? Augmentation of store using technology. Uber? Augmentation of taxis. Chatbots? Augmentation of chat clients. Slack? Augmentation of email + chats. Distributed/Cloud applications? Augmentation of legacy applications. To some extent even Google is an augmentation of a manual filing system. I would admit listing examples that confirm an idea that I already had is close to a logical fallacy, so I tried to find counter examples, i.e. software solutions that try to introduce completely new concepts, but could not think of any. Of course we could argue over semantics in defining what constitute true innovation versus augmentation of an existing technology, but ultimately I think it is fair to say that the most successful technologies are augmenting our experience rather than being completely disruptive, despite what most of my field would argue. Therefore, augmentation must be at least considered as part of the future of any software industry, such as the Big Data industry.

Augmentation is better than transformation

Human nature needs comfort, that’s why most of us prefer augmentation over disruption. By disruption, I’m talking about transforming or replacing the existing systems, not adding features: selling unpaired socks over internet is not disrupting the sock industry, despite what the TED talks would like me to believe. Seriously, when you have existing technologies, as every company does, a replacement/transformation is a hard pill to swallow. Loss of investment, knowledge, process, etc. It is especially risky and complex when talking about data layer transformation, as I argued before in this very blog. So when given a choice, augmenting existing data layers is an obvious choice for risk-advert IT organizations.

Augmentation drives innovation

Perhaps the most convincing argument towards acknowledging that augmentation is the future of data is the analysis of the most innovative big data software solutions: machine learning, neural networks and all of these extremely complex systems which behaviors are almost impossible to predict, even for experts. These systems are design to augment their own capabilities, instead of having a set of deterministic rules to follow. Indeed, these systems are designed to approach the capabilities of complex biological systems and therefore incorporate their “messiness”. We can’t think of big data systems using physics thinking (i.e. here is an algorithm, here is a set of parameters, this is the result expected), but we should rather rely to biology thinking (i.e. what is the results I get if I input this parameter). A great example of this type of thinking is Netflix’s Chaos Monkey, a service running on AWS to simulate failures and understand the behavior of their architecture. Self-augmentation is the principle upon which the technologies of the future are built. We understand the algorithms we input but not necessarily the outcome, which can have unintended consequences sometimes (see: Microsoft Tay), but ultimately is a better pathway to intelligent technologies. I’m a control freak, and not being able to understand a system end to end drives me nuts, but I’m willing to relinquish my sanity for the good of Artificial Intelligence.

Conclusion

With software Augmentation being part of our everyday life, a safer and easier way to add features to existing data layer, and the core concept of machine learning, I think it is fair to say that it is the future of Data. Did I convince myself? Yes, which is good because my opinion is usually my first go to when it comes to figuring out what I think. Seriously though, what do you think? As always, I long to learn more and listen to everyone’s opinion!