Photo/Shetuwang

Sept.25 (NBD) -- Money has a very important function that greases the market but now it is being taken over by data, said Oxford professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger at the 17th Western China International Fair last Friday.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, also a consultant for many large tech companies and author of Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, had an interview with NBD on the sidelines of the event.

Artificial intelligence, continuation of the revolution that started 6 years ago

NBD：It has been six years since you published the Big Data, what changes has big data brought to human society and how will it continue to change in the future?

Mayer-Schönberger: When Kenneth and I wrote Big Data in 2012, we saw something that nobody else were seeing. And people looked at us and said that is never going to happen. Now 5-6 years later, we've already seen it everywhere. Not just the Internet, not just how Alibaba does recommendations and how Baidu does search results. It's also how autonomous driving cars drive themselves. It's IBM's Waston to indentify skin cancer better than your skin doctor.

We are seeing Industrial 4.0. What is the most important change I see? Big data now is everywhere. Sometimes we have a different word for it now. We call it artificial intelligence. But our artificial intelligence today is nothing but big data-driven machine learning. So in that sense, this is a continuation of the revolution that started 6 years ago. And now it is beginning to enter every sector.

I have a new book coming out and it talks about how economy, the market, businesses change thanks to data. A lot of people say data is the new oil because it is a new resource. Data is not just new oil but the new money because money has a very important function that makes market work and that it is now being taken over by data.

Old markets are based on price, whereas new markets based on data

NBD: What do you think of Bitcoin as a digital currency?

Mayer-Schönberger: Bitcoin is not the future, because Bitcoin is just another kind of money. Market works well when buyers and sellers find something they like. When the market grows and becomes bigger and bigger, then there's too much information that needs to be exchanged. So we cannot do that anymore. So what we have done is condense all the information into price and only to communicate price. That works in traditional market. But the problem is that as we condense everything into price, a lot of details get lost.

Old markets are based on price and there are new markets based on data. That means money and banks are going to be less important in the future. The main message of my new book is that the market will win but finance capitalism will lose. 

NBD: People worry that their jobs will be replaced by AI and some people even worry that AI will take place of the whole human being. Do you think we should worry about that? What can we do?

Mayer-Schönberger: Yes, like the industrial revolution, the new revolution will make many people unemployed. To me, the big question is whether in 20 years, we have more people working or less people working, and what to do with those people who lose their jobs.

In the U.S., the most popular job in 30 states of the 50 states is truck driver. But truck drivers will lose their jobs to self-driving trucks. You may need data analysts in the future, but truck drivers cannot be analysts overnight because they don't have skills. I am worried about the 40-, 50-, and 60-year-old truck drivers who will be out of job. 

If we as a society do not put in place policy measures to help people who lose their jobs, then it will be troubling the society. We risks harmony in our society. Maybe we need to have some basic income that everybody gets. Maybe we need to rethink what a job is for us. Right now, work for us is 40, 45, and 50 hours a week for a certain employer. Maybe in the future we can divide our 40 hours in multiple jobs. 

Email: tanyuhan@nbd.com.cn