Big Data and Changing Concepts of the Human

Big Data has the potential to enable unprecedentedly rigorous quantitative modeling of complex human social relationships and social structures. When such models are extended to non-human domains, they can undermine anthropocentric assumptions about the extent to which these relationships and structures are specifically human. Discoveries of relevant commonalities with non-humans may not make us less human, but they promise to challenge fundamental views of what it is to be human.