The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories
For decades, data has been the fuel that powers business. But we’re still figuring out how to use this new power source efficiently, and our economic and social arrangements have not yet adapted to the changes (The Economist). As machine-learning based artificial intelligence becomes the foundation of a new kind of economy, companies have learned to hoard data. But they haven’t figured out a convenient or standardized way to trade it. In this way, it’s not like oil at all — or maybe it’s like oil was before Standard Oil standardized it.
Data isn’t a commodity, yet. That’s because we don’t know how to turn it into fungible units, and we don’t yet know how to track fluctuations in its value depending on timing and context. But this is the kind of problem that processing power and good algorithms will probably solve over time. We’re just scratching the surface of this technology’s capabilities — think PCs in 1982 or the Web in 1994.
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