

Sell your data to save the economy and your future - simonbrown
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22658152

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yummyfajitas
This guy seems desperate to impose some weird marxist theories onto the
digital world. The benefits accrue to whoever has the biggest computers (i.e.,
the most capital)?

Back in the real world, most datasets that make money are small enough to load
into Pandas/Excel/R.

And leaving the semantics aside, HFT, Social Media and Amazon are all
remarkably similar? Uh, what?

Why does this incoherent babble keep getting posted here?

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nathan_long
>> In an ultra-automated economy, there won't be much to trade other than
information.

If we reach the point where there's not much to trade in, most of the uses he
lists for information would also be gone. If scarceness disappeared, there
would be no point to advertising or stock trading, for example.

The monetary value of information is mostly dependent on it enabling other
transactions.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Don't worry, there will always be zero-sum rents to collect on natural
resources, especially land!

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nathan_long
>> If robotic surgeons get really good, will tomorrow's surgeons be in the
same boat as today's musicians?

This requires AI on the level of humans or higher. Can you really imagine a
robot pediatrician playing with a child to assess developmental milestones,
gagueing caregiver behavior for signs of abuse, or patiently asking questions
of toothless Grandma who can't describe the symptoms without telling her whole
life story?

I can certainly imagine a computer taking ultrasound images and lab values as
input and detecting cancer more accurately than humans can. But that's the
sort of narrow task we know how to program for.

I think we'll never see AI on the "replace doctors" level, but those who think
we will refer to it as a "singularity", after which predictions are useless.
If we ever get robot overlords, I doubt they'll want your data.

Meanwhile, any job demanding hard-to-script actions will be safe.

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struppi
There is some truth in this article, but it also seems a little bit simplistic
and/or watered down. It's not really about who owns the biggest computer, it's
much more than that. Just access to processing power would not have made
facebook and google big, so why should it work in the future?

Also, automation has been replacing traditional jobs for almost 200 years now,
and we are mostly better off now then we were then. After some rough time
always learned to profit from automation as a society. Maybe, as automation
accelerates, the rough time won't stop anymore - like eternal september - but
my bet is that we learn to cope with that too...

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drucken
Technology available to a few among many has always existed.

Only lack of political leadership, and in the modern world, lack of global
political cooperation, is disenfranchising the middle class and re-investment
back into society.

It is the age old tug of war between forms of oligarchy (plutocracy and
corporatocracy are forms of oligarchy) and forms of democracy. Severe societal
crises, including wars, ensure a return of power in every case.

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chipsy
I don't want to dismiss the article - Xanadu remains an intriguing idea even
now - but it leans heavily on the concept that market forces can create wealth
equality, and the historical record of that is sketchy at best. Markets are,
after all, a means, not an end.

