Nuestra NEBRIJA 26 - Julio 2018

32 Article Nowadays, the best students of economics and business do not compete in the labor market with philosophers or sociolo- gists. They compete with phy- sicists, engineers and mathe- maticians, profiles that, thanks to their capacities in handling and processing data, they are offering comparative advanta- ges over the rest. When some student, elusive when it comes to mathematics and econome- trics, looks at me skeptically, I suspect that my message has fallen on deaf ears. Then I pro- phesy, with a certain theatrical air, the advent of dataism. In the final pages of the exce- llent Homo Deus, the historian Yuval Noah Harari anticipates the emergence of a new post- humanist creed: the dataism. This trend conceives the uni- verse as an incessant flow of data and attributes value to phenomena and entities based on their contribution to this flow. Under this perspective, human beings are reduced to minus- cule chips within a universal information system. In our day to day, we make decisions, res- pond to emails, conduct sear- ches and purchases online, we post photos, give opinions in forums, download music, share likes, send emojis and become friends on Facebook of people that we will never meet in real life. Thanks to all the information we generate and through inte- lligent algorithms, dataism as- pires to conquer the world with the promise of satisfying our needs for consumption, health, affection, communication and happiness. Today, when we buy from Amazon, the platform su- ggests (usually with great suc- cess) books that we may also like. In the future, the algorithms will tell us who our soul mate is, based on meticulous persona- lity profiles, tastes, consump- tion, concerns and values of candidates as well as our his- tory, which will include a record of our biological rhythms and emotions in previous relations- hips with the different profiles. "The management and reading of data", I conclude before my students, "is one of the profes- sions of the future". A specialist in this field can actually analyze anything, since the models can be easily adapted to different areas of knowledge, including medicine, psychology, marke- ting and nutrition, among many others. This flexibility is one of the great assets of this profes- sional profile. I am telling you this frommy own personal experience. My aca- demic activity throughout the last few years has been, preci- sely, to establish quantitative re- lationships between variables. In my case, it has not been in the field of networks and onli- ne activity, but in the field of The advent of dataism Santiago Budría. Principal Investigator at the School of Social Sciences, Nebrija University We investigate how and to what extent the welfare and happiness of people depend on social relationships, inequalities, personality, working conditions, money, education, health and quality of family life.