The Data Economy is here. Now what?
Welcome to a New Era
In only a few short years since the emergence of the World Wide Web, society has transitioned into a revolutionary new era — that of the “data economy.” Such a large-scale transformation has happened seemingly overnight. In a 2017 EU report, it was estimated that by 2020 the value of the EU’s ‘data economy’ alone would approach EUR 643 billion (approx. 3.17% of total EU GDP), up from an estimated EUR 257 billion in just 2014.
The consequences of increased datafication of our world have altered society in dramatic ways, both productive and divisive. The products of the data economy have increased the personalization of healthcare; opened up universal, remote learning opportunities; offered us glimpses into natural environments previously off-limits to humans; and broadened our understanding of the world we’re living in through the progressively advanced small computers we call smart phones that many of us now carry every day, to name just a few examples. Yet the same tools that have led to these advances have also allowed engineers to design deliberately addictive social media platforms; led to the increased quantification of nearly every aspect of our waking and sleeping daily lives; crafted a bombardment of hyper-personalized advertisements extending beyond the confines of the internet; and even developed extremely skilled remote and depersonalized weapons systems.
These developments are read by stakeholders in fundamentally different ways. Some, like increasingly personalized healthcare, are perceived to be moving human society towards a utopia like that found in the Star Trek universe. Others consider these same steps to be a threat to humanity, spiraling us into a technological dystopia not unlike the 1997 film Gattaca. When you’re amid such monumental changes, it is often hard to know which is which. And yet, this confusion perfectly encompasses two core aspects of the data economy: It has already had significant effects on the world, and it has created more questions than answers.
What is the Data Economy?
Perhaps it is best to start at the beginning. What is, exactly, the ‘data economy’? The data economy is a new phenomenon encompassing the whole of the ‘data market’ — defined by a 2013 European Data Market study as the “generation, collection, storage, processing, distribution, analysis, elaboration, delivery, and exploitation of data enabled by digital technologies” — a process where raw information about the world is translated into valuable bytes that comprise digital data, which can then be transferred, bought, and sold. The technologies enabling this at a transformative global scale have only truly appeared in the past several decades, aided by an explosion of computing power, the rise of the internet, increased automation of data collection, and the growing adoption of ‘smart’ devices, sensors, and proliferation of cell phones (and later, smart phones). Given the rapid pace at which this transformation has taken place, even those embedded within the industries that are created by the data economy are still struggling to understand what changes it brings mean for society — both in our day-to-day lives and from a longer-term, birds’ eye perspective.
This unprecedented creation and commodification of information about the world that we are seeing occurring in the data market, and by extension data economy, has a tremendous potential to transform nearly every aspect of our lives. It ranges from small moments, like how we pay for our groceries that are used to make our daily meals, to the larger ones, like how and what inputs are now used to shape national agricultural policies.
Even at a surface level there are many questions we can ask about the data economy: What data is being collected? How it is collected? Who is collecting it? The more we interrogate the answers to these questions, the more questions also emerge: How is the raw information about our world selected and translated into bytes, and from there transformed into the valuable resource of “digital data”? How is this resource then stored, transferred, commodified, sold, and in general used by different stakeholders?
When we step back and look at the processes taking place that have been enabled by the data economy, we find there are even deeper layers: What privacy laws exist for all this data that is being created, and to whom do they apply? How can this revolution put new tools in the hands of billions, allowing the heretofore unforeseen development of new — well, everything? We have never been in this type of situation before — which is why it is so critical that we pause in the roaring stream carrying us forward to properly question what is going on, and use the answers we find to help channel this unstoppable change in a direction that can be used for good.
The Challenges Ahead
When you step back and examine the scope and scale of this transformation, it becomes apparent that understanding and responsibly stewarding the data economy’s ongoing emergence is arguably one of, if not the most important global challenge facing humanity today. There are other pressing challenges — among them mitigating the effects of global climate change; addressing food security; reducing drastic economic inequalities; increasing universal basic education; and improving global healthcare standards — yet each of these other grand challenges now frequently relies on the core inputs and outputs created by the data economy to both understand and address those challenges themselves.
Escalating globalization had led to an increasingly interconnected world, one where the tools we need to ‘solve’ these intractable and tightly woven challenges are simultaneously being built as these challenges arise. The creation and consumption of digital data is leading to fast, dramatic advances in fields that didn’t even popularly exist even a decade ago: Fields like machine learning, meaningful robotics, and large-scale automation. These changes are continuing to revolutionize our world at a surging pace, connecting diverse international stakeholders and equipping them with powerful tools that can be used to create even more powerful tools — tools that, like money, are not inherently good or bad by themselves, but can be used for such ends.
The crux of the data economy is that it is unlike any other industrial revolution we have previously seen. In our current instance, we are witnessing a fundamental change in the way that humans interact, brought on (in part) by the ability for people around the world to no longer be geographically bound in their ideas of what ‘community’ and a sense of ‘belonging’ mean to them. At the core of these transformations, though, has been the creation of new technologies and systems capturing, organizing, analyzing, and sharing slices of our world at a scale and speed we have never seen.
Given the scope of these impacts, it hardly comes as a surprise that most articles and analyses to date on the data economy are bound by siloed thinking. Engineers developing the underlying technology are frequently engrossed with the models themselves; managers are focusing on how profit can be made; legislators struggle to regulate an ever-evolving ocean of new technology and information system processes; and futurists from Reddit and beyond wear themselves out, caught up in dystopian visions of the singularity.
From the perspective of the Good Data Initiative (GDI), these silos lead to myopia: They are limited perspectives that bias our understanding of this transformation right from the start. Instead, we need to critically evaluate the current state of affairs; identify those issues that we know we need to learn more about and address; and use this information to answer what is arguable the core dilemma of the data economy:
If approximately 146 gigabytes of data per day are being produced for every person on Earth, how do we use this for good?
Answering this seemingly simple question is not so easy. To do it well — to ensure we are developing strong stewards to guide this ever-evolving revolution towards a more just, equal, and inspiring world than we have today — will require interdisciplinary and intergenerational collaboration to break down those myopic silos. It will take curiosity, bias towards action, and a realistic optimism to imagine and realize a better environment for ourselves and our grandchildren.
More concretely, though, answering this seemingly simple question will mean educating ourselves and those around us continuously. It will mean ensuring critical issues are highlighted and sufficiently addressed by relevant stakeholders before they become unmanageable behemoths. It will mean taking on the responsibility of realizing that this new world will be what we make of it. Most of all, it will mean driving this change to ensure one of the greatest disruptions of our era will be one leading us towards a better unknown.
For more information about the Good Data Initiative, visit our website at: https://www.gooddatainitiative.com/
