The US government has recently ramped up a plan to unite innumerable databases across the globe, enabling researchers to seek insight from in-depth information sitting idle and siloed without some intelligence to piece it all together into something meaningful. The idea was, if we can let these databases talk to each other, and run algorithms against this information, we can uncover relationships that had previously gone unnoticed and use this insight to better track changes in population, death rates, disease, etc. The possibilities were vague, but potentially endless.  

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and Director of the W3C, briefly explains:

But human-devised mashups require a great amount of effort, time and insight bordering on luck. I want to think beyond this, toward the possibility of data-driven mashups, and the potential for beauty and augmented human experience that might possibly be created in a sort of data-centric primordial soup.

The ultimate level of intelligence that can be gained from data interaction seems to hinge on three factors: 
1. How aware can the data be of itself? 
2. Can the seeking out of data relationships be made intelligent without human guidance? 
3. What can this intelligence do with the information to make it immediately meaningful?

If these things can be made possible, or even partly so, I suspect it could lead to this end:
1. Data will be self-aware, understanding its own content type, limitations and potential
2. Data will be able to seek out bonds with other strategically identified and vulnerable data like a virus seeking a cell, or one bondable atom seeking out another
3. The consummation of these data will generate an expression that is more than the sum of its parts

What I personally desire to see from this is a parallel plane where data are creating expressive "ideas" based on their specific interactions, and feeding that new intelligence back to the human sector. In other words, what could data do when we're not around?

There's been a lot of effort put into developing the data cloud, getting the burden of storage, maintenance and control off our human/hardware shoulders. There's an opportunity here beyond alleviating the baggage of the traditional human computer interaction model. There's a chance for the data itself to start building relationships, socialize the cloud itself, and turn that into a storm of expressive meaning. 

Our data is already starting to socialize on our behalf. 3rd party applications on Facebook already mine our personal and social data in order to tell developers what products and services should be created. Advertising is hyper-targeted to us in real-time with minimal human intelligence directing the relationship. I have access to all my co-workers iTunes and can use that data to create new and engaging Genius mixes. But these are just training wheels. It could be doing more.

Data should be mixing its own expression into our social sphere. 

What if new songs could be generated based on the playlists of 100,000 iTunes libraries, mixing vocal and instrumental styles, even lyrics, into artificially intelligent, but expressive new audio creations that live alongside "human-made" music in a playlist...

What if video composites of a million-plus Youtube clips could be mashed together into a montage of an objectively observed and synthesized human experience (which is already fundamentally filtered by a machine — the camera) into a piece of video art as impressionistic and a David Arnofsky film, and fed back into the social media layer...

What if Star Trek's holodeck, where humans re-live a nostalgic virtual world, was boring compared to the fictional, impossible environments that data-mashed expression could create, enabling new physics, new forms of experience, and new senses that we could never dream of on our own…

This could be the alchemy we've always been seeking from the material world. It could be the spontaneous generation that made us look like fools. It could an expressive input to human design and experience that we all assume some alien race will imbue us with when their advanced technology is handed to us from green-glowing, silicone hands with 8 inch fingers.

Data isn't smarter that us. It's dumber. And that's the beauty of its potential interaction whereby it embraces randomness, destruction and order as if these are all equally likely laws in an equally unlikely universe. 

Privacy rules? Hmmmm...