Can robots be our friends?

Data is driving a revolution in business, with techniques such as robotic process automation (RPA) taking the drudgery out of work. But who will benefit, asks Jason Walsh

Timandra Harkness, author of the books Big Data: Does Size Matter? Picture: T Croggan

If there was a time when data didn’t matter, it must have been before the first human counted on their fingers: data, and the ability to record and analyse it, has always been at the centre of what it means to be human.

Today, though, with almost a century of developments in digital computing behind us, and, more recently, massive reductions in the cost of computation, storage and networking, data is being analysed in ways ...