If, per Edward Chancellor, Schumpeter et al., cheap money is not a boon but a bane, to the extent that it encourages laxity and indiscipline, what about cheap data? Both in terms of storage and throughput, Moore's law and it's corollaries have dramatically expanded access to data over our lifetimes. Geometrically and constantly. It seems like a good thing.
But is it?
Cheap data's omnipresence has created the world in which we have handed our lives over post by post, picture by picture, to the social networks and those who have thought hard about how to use them to control us. As virality and affinity dominate our lives evermore and drive us deeper and deeper into opposing camps, we've seen online conflict irrupt thence into the once quasi-autonomous Real World, both in elections and killings. Even wars.
But what if data were more expensive rather than cheaper? Might this not have beneficial effects, just as higher interest rates encourage creative destruction, innovation, capital efficiency and, over time, higher productivity? Indeed, why not tax data flow, instead of just monetary flow?
I know it sounds crazy and there are lots of reasons not to, but it's worth gaming it out in our minds. It's a debate worth having. Do we really benefit from the ever more readily and cheaply available data? Or do we suffer?
3 comments:
AI scraping the Internet without any accountability or transparency is decreasing the value of data. When information is discovered, data is gathered or an original work is created, the work involved must be paid for in some way to provide an incentive for the advancement of the collective knowledge of humanity. If current AI policy allows all the information on the Internet to be collected without royalties or fees,cheap data will become the norm. AI companies then imposing fees on users for organizing and manipulating original content created by others will constitute the largest shift in the devaluation of human labor since the creation of slavery.
I hear you, and this is well-stated. But what I was really talking about was cheap data as such: however many terabytes of storage one can have on the pin of a needle and/or sent down to a browser over at the tickling of a pixel. Is this not the prior condition that cheapens the rest of it? Might not physical media and the transaction costs they imposed have served to ennoble the work of others? Think of the respect shown for books in times and places where they are scarce.
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