Global data created per year

It turns out that as humanity has generated ever more staggering quantities of data—selfies, spreadsheets, surveillance footage, and whatever it is that fills the cloud—more pedestrians have been getting hit by cars. The obvious conclusion is that we are so busy looking at our phones that we have forgotten how to cross the street, which is almost certainly not what the data scientists meant when they talked about information being dangerous. The correlation spans only eight years, which in statistical terms is barely a glance, but what a glance it is.

The period from 2015 to 2022 saw global data creation explode from roughly 15 zettabytes per year to over 90 zettabytes—a sixfold increase driven by smartphones, IoT sensors, video streaming, and the general human compulsion to digitize everything. During that same window, pedestrian fatalities in the US climbed from about 5,500 to nearly 7,500, a 36 percent increase attributed by safety researchers to larger vehicles (SUVs and trucks now dominate new car sales), higher speed limits, distracted driving, and yes, distracted walking. Both trends are symptoms of the smartphone era: more data because more devices, more deaths because more distraction. They share a common ancestor in the rectangular glowing object in your pocket.

Eight data points is not much of a foundation for cosmic truth, but it is enough to make you look up from your phone the next time you step off a curb. The data explosion and the pedestrian crisis are both products of the same technological moment, moving in lockstep not because one causes the other but because we built a world optimized for screens. The crosswalk remains analog.