Hi All,

Seems timely ...

The New York Times (6 March 2018) - Your Data Is Crucial to a Robotic Age. Shouldn’t You Be Paid for It?

A great read. From the article ...

Data is the crucial ingredient of the A.I. revolution. Training systems to perform even relatively straightforward tasks like voice translation, voice transcription or image recognition requires vast amounts of data — like tagged photos, to identify their content, or recordings with transcriptions.

“Among leading A.I. teams, many can likely replicate others’ software in, at most, one to two years,” notes the technologist Andrew Ng. “But it is exceedingly difficult to get access to someone else’s data. Thus data, rather than software, is the defensible barrier for many businesses.”

We may think we get a fair deal, offering our data as the price of sharing puppy pictures. By other metrics, we are being victimized: In the largest technology companies, the share of income going to labor is only about 5 to 15 percent, Mr. Posner and Mr. Weyl write. That’s way below Walmart’s 80 percent. Consumer data amounts to work they get free.

“If these A.I.-driven companies represent the future of broader parts of the economy,” they argue, “without something basic changing in their business model, we may be headed for a world where labor’s share falls dramatically from its current roughly 70 percent to something closer to 20 to 30 percent.”

Source: The New York Times