Patrick Tucker is the deputy editor of The Futurist magazine, as well as director of communications for the World Future Society. Whereas other cultural commentators have written about the shape of tomorrow in terms of big data, Tucker sees our entry into the telemetric age as the big story. He defines telemetry as "the process or practice of obtaining measurements in one place and then relaying them for recording or display to a point at a distance."

Tucker shows how subtle changes are taking place in our world and in our relationships as he probes the weather, dating services, the issue of privacy on social networks, crime prediction, and education options.

Here are some very interesting aspects of our entry into the telemetric age:

• "Between checking your phone, using GPS, sending e-mail, tweets and Facebook posts, and especially streaming movies and music, you create 1.8 million megabytes a year. It's enough to fill nine CD-ROMs every day.

• There will be forty-four times as much digital information in 2020 (35 zettabytes) as there was in 2009 (8 zettabytes) according the research group IDC.

• According to a recent report from the Pew Internet and American Life survey, one in five American use some sort of device to track health stats either for themselves or someone else.

The upshot of the age of telemetry is that we are already in a world that anticipates our every move. He concludes: "As we become participants in systems, networks, and communities where data collection plays a role; as we encounter more apps, programs, and platforms that need our data to run; predictability improves as privacy vanishes, a consequence of computers making record keeping and record sharing easier and cheaper."