Sell your data to save the economy and your future

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?

>> 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.

>> 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.

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...

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.

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.