How much do we rely on data?

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Big Data is refocussing our mindset. The kinds of inductive correlation we find, which is relatively easy to generate through data mining, provides predictive power and actionable information but little in the way of explanation.

The thing with big data is, we still don't know why people do what they do, but they do it. And we track and graph and measure it, in ways we never could before.
So you could say that, in the past, humankind spent lifetimes trying to find explanations and was looking for what caused events.
Today, with data, explanations and causation are no longer relevant and became 'black boxes', we are only interested in correlation and prediction.

I'm curious by nature, so this actually saddens me. How can we predict without caring about what drove people/events in the first place? What's the point of having predictive power, when that's all it is?
Predictions lacking info to bring forward change?