Two things have occurred that have had a profound influence on how I see the future global economy. The first was reading the February 27th issue of The Economist (peace to S.bot for giving it to me, I need a subscription) which focuses on “The Data Deluge” and the second was learning about nano technology.
This issue of The Economist gave me a broader context in terms of thinking about data management, the merging of virtual and material realities, and what this means for? negros in the US, women making $2/day in the global south, social justice movements and democracy in general.
There are about six relevant quotes.
On the importance of interdisciplinary statisticians in the future:
CIO’s have become somewhat prominent in the executive suite, and a new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who combines skills of software programs, statistician and storyteller/artist to extract nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data. Hal Varian Googles, chief economist predicts the job of statistician will become the sexiest around. Data, he explains are widely available:what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.
How companies profit from our time online, Facebook, Ebay etc:
Across the internet economy, companies are compiling masses of data on people, their activities, their likes and dislikes, their relationships with others and even where they are at any particular moment?and keeping mum. For example, Facebook, a social-networking site, tracks the activities of its 400m users, half of whom spend an average of almost an hour on the site every day, but does not talk about what it finds. Google reveals a little but holds back a lot. Even eBay, the online auctioneer, keeps quiet.
On the data becoming as important to and/or replacing labor and capital:
Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic imput on par with capital and labour. “Everyday I wake up and ask ‘how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyzes data better.” says Rollin Ford , the CIO of Wal-Mart
On being bombarded with information daily:
In 2008 such households were bombarded with 3.6 zetabytes of information or 34 gigbaytes per person per day. The biggest data hogs were video games and television. In terms of bytes, written words are insignificant, amounting to less than 0.1 of the total. However the amount of reading people do, previously in decline because of television has almost tripled since 1998, thanks to all the text on the internet.
From exploiting labor to exploiting information, (how Google does it):
The company that gets the most out of its data is Google. Creating new economic value from unthinkably large amounts of information is its lifeblood. That helps explain why, on inspection, the market capitalization of the 11-year-old firm, of around $170 billion, is not so outlandish. Google exploits information that is a by-product of user interactions, or data exhaust, which is automatically recycled to improve the service or create an entirely new product.
On machines taking to machines:
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“Significantly, information created by machines and used by other machine’s will probably grow faster than anything else, explains Roger Bohn of the UCSD, one of the authors of the study on American households. This is primarily database to database information- people are only tangentially involve in most of it”
I mentioned writing this post to an engineer and he told me about nano technology, and how it will have profound implications for labor in the it involves creating machines on a molecular level that can build things such as bridges, cars.
The implications of nanotechnology is pretty straight forward,
Products made with nanotechnology may require little labor, land, or maintenance, be highly productive, low in cost, and have modest requirements for materials and energy.
Dude. Little machines that BUILD stuff?
Which leads me to a few questions:
If machine labor, replaces human labor what does this mean in a society where we derive who we are based on our jobs?
Do the social justice folks, and the data scientists talk to each other, if they did, how would their respective work change, if at all?
Learn more: Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
The social movement folks need to be hollering at the scientist.
For realisies.
I highly doubt the data scientists and social justice people talk, especially in an interdisciplinary and collaborative way to produce products that are technologically advanced and benefit society.
Every other time I read your blog, I reconsider going back to my engineering roots but realizing that combining them with public policy is good too.