Kenneth Cukier


Kenneth Neil Cukier is an American journalist and author of books on technology and society. He is best known for his work at The Economist and the book Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Work, Live and Think, coauthored with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2013.

Career

He has also written for The New York Times, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs and other publications. He was technology editor of the Wall Street Journal Asia edition in Hong Kong in 2001. In 1999 he coined the term "Frenchelon" to describe the French government's surveillance capabilities.

Publications

Big Data was a New York Times bestseller, translated into 21 languages and a finalist for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. The pair published a follow-on work in 2014, Learning With Big Data: The Future of Education.

Media

In a radio interview in September 2016, Cukier described the current big data revolution as an agent of change similar to the Gutenberg press and the Printing Revolution. He cautioned that while there will be huge the benefits, there is a need to have limitations in place to "preserve our fundamental freedoms" and to prevent Big Data from being another version of Orwell's Big Brother.

Boards

In 2008 he was named to the board of directors of International Bridges to Justice. In 2015 he joined the board of The Open String Foundation, which provides classical instruments to disadvantaged children.

Affiliations

In 2016 he was elected as a trustee of Chatham House, a British international affairs institute. In 2017 he was named an associate fellow at the University of Oxford's Said Business School, where he has run sessions on artificial intelligence and business.

Awards

He received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio.