Large numbers are dehumanising, so should big data worry us?

From natural disasters to the scale of government spying, we don't seem able to process figures we can't relate to. So will we fall into big data's empathy gap?

It's a little unclear whether Joseph Stalin actually said, "the death of one man is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic", but it seems about right.

The number of lives the Soviet dictator ended is so large that it is mind-boggling. And it seems "mind-boggling" is a literal description of what happens when we encounter large numbers. It seems humans don't really know how to process figures which they can't personally relate to, and this has surprising consequences.