The New Data Economy — A Radical Prediction of the Future

What if the future of money is “no money” and the future of work, “no work”?

The fiction of yesterday is the truth of today. You don’t need to look beyond the most common uses of technology today, like video calling to realize that it would have sounded like a radical prediction just a few decades ago. Still, old sci-fi television shows from as far back as the 1960s showed people communicating using video enabled watches and hand-held devices. This was way before the invention of the computer as we know it.

We have been led to believe that the progress of civilization generally follows a linear trajectory with incremental changes. While that may have been true for the last few thousand years, the change our civilization is going through is unlike anything that has ever transpired in the past. It is not merely a linear progression of civilization; it is the birth of a “new kind” of civilization — one in which human potential will grow to unfathomable proportions.

The impact of this change is going to be much more than we can perceive with our mindsets rooted in the economic, social and political orders of today. While we partly understand the future potential of emerging technologies, we continue to undermine their implications in shaping the human life of tomorrow. The collective impact of technology and the blurring of the divide between man and machine will make human lives drastically different from anything we have ever predicted. I call this vision of the future, “The New Data Economy.”

As a student of money and economics, I was fascinated by the evolution of money and the role it has played in shaping the economic models from barter system to fiat currency and the fractional reserve banking system. I believe that social and political systems of an era are largely based on economic determinants. As I continue to follow the advancements in digital payments and cryptocurrencies, I am awestruck by the potential convergence of technologies like Internet of Things, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Nanotechnology and Quantum Computing. Each time I think of humanity’s march towards an era of Singularity, I cannot but conclude a new kind of socio-economic order unfolding in our future, one in which?money may not exist.

With simultaneous changes happening to create an enabling environment, money will eventually be replaced by data. Over the last decade, we have seen the transition of Information Technology to Data Technology which has enabled Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence through the use of advanced algorithms. However, the role of data has been restricted to that of a commodity — a means to earn revenue by either monetizing data itself or by using it to create and sell better products and services. In the?New Data Economy, the data will become money itself.

As the traditional political order of the world gives way to the formation of a central global dispensation, the rationale for money as a medium of exchange will cease to exist. In this new world, humans will be afforded the means to survive and thrive in exchange for data. The global government with absolute control of the earth’s resources and technology, will be able to provide sustenance to the world’s population in exchange for real-time data related to every aspect of their existence and activities. After all, we generate tens of thousands of data points just by going about our business every day. On the other hand, the growth of the world population will have stagnated, with birth rate balanced by death rate. As an corollary, human vocation will not exist in the future; at least not as a means to earn a living. Just like the future of money is no money, the future of work is no work.

Technology will not merely be pervasive but omnipresent and free. Imagine a robot working in your backyard growing food and stocking your refrigerator, perhaps even cooking a nice warm meal for you. Likewise, you would just step out of your house and an autonomous vehicle will show up through the power of brain-machine-interface and take you wherever you wanted to go. The interesting thing is that you would neither own the robot nor the vehicle.

All production of goods and services will happen through self-sustaining technology powered by renewable energy transmitted wirelessly to an interconnected network of machines. The use of earth’s depletable resources will be a thing of the past.

We are told that the revolution in health sciences will create cures for every disease. I argue that with advancements in nanotechnology and regenerative medicine, disease as we know it will not exist. There will be no doctors, no surgeons and no pharmaceutical industry.

In this post-capitalism world where there are no countries and hence no international borders, the only trade will be that of ideas, knowledge and culture. With the emergence of local sourcing and production, concentration of ownership with a single global entity, transition to 100% renewable energy and exponential increase in productivity due to advanced technologies, the concepts of economies of scale and division of labour will no longer be relevant in the world of tomorrow. Hence, private corporations will not exist. The standard of living will generally be homogenous for everyone and poverty will not exist.

This is a riveting idea of an irreversible transformation of our today into a tomorrow that offers immeasurable opportunities but also unknown challenges. Supported by the core idea that data will be the money of the future, what I suggest sounds like a farfetched Orwellian thought but one which I am convinced will eventually come to pass. Several changes in different facets of human life may continue to happen simultaneously at varying speeds but collectively they will all converge and create a future that is beyond our wildest imagination.

Originally published on Medium