Atlantic Canada is well positioned to take advantage of the burgeoning field of big data, one of the world’s leading information technology thinkers says.

“The amazing opportunity we have is that almost infinite computing power is now available to anyone around the world,” Andrew McAfee said in an interview Tuesday.

The professor and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be one of the keynote speakers at the Big Data Congress in Saint John, N.B., Thursday.

Organized by the New Brunswick Information Technology Council and T4G Ltd., the one-day event will focus on how the Atlantic region can harness big data and attract marquee technology firms to invest in the data science centre of excellence.

IBM Canada Ltd. has already announced plans to set up a new global analytics centre in Nova Scotia, for example.

“You don’t need to be near a university supercomputer centre anymore,” said McAfee, also an author and blogger, about how computerization affects business, society, the economy and the workforce.

“We now have the ability and tools to let excellence manifest itself, even if excellence is not in Manhattan or Silicon Valley or Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

But while harnessing big data will mean a more productive, abundant economy, McAfee said it will create competition for labour.

“Digital progress is steady, inexorable and irreversible and computers are getting better and a lot faster. The tough news is that for people that want to offer their labour to the economy, it’s going to get tougher and tougher to do.”

For example, several years ago most people thought computers would never be able to drive cars, he said.

“In 2004 a couple of smart guys wrote a great book,” McAfee said, referring to The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market.

“It’s about what human labour is good at versus what digital labour is good at and the comparable advantages of each. But they said there are some things that people are just better at and one of the examples they gave was driving a car in traffic.

“But six years later, Google announced that it was driving its autonomous vehicles on American roads in traffic, racking up hundreds of thousands of miles of accident-free driving.”

With the exception of creative, artistic or entrepreneurial endeavours, McAfee said there are likely few jobs that machines won’t one day do better.

“We’re seeing computers do stuff that they never ever could do before. We’re really surprised by things they’re able to do now that we didn’t think would be possible, even a few years ago.”

As computers harness more data, McAfee said the capabilities of machines will increase.

“A huge part of the reason computers are doing all these astonishing things is that they are able to access and make sense of ridiculous amounts of data by historical standards.”

The Big Data Congress aims to demonstrate the depth of technology within Atlantic Canada and the opportunity to create a nexus of data science professionals in the region.

The event also features information technology expert Tom Davenport; Stephen Johnson, author and one of Prospect magazine’s Top Ten Brains of the Digital Future; and Andreas Weigend, Stanford University lecturer and director of the Social Data Lab.