Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data Quotes

“The rise of a market in which a substantial part of the transactional process is automated, and the decline of the firm as the dominating organizational structure to organize human activity efficiently will uproot labor markets around the world. Nations will face the need to respond to this profound shift in the economy as it endangers many millions of jobs, fuels widespread worries in countless nations, and is already driving populist political movements.”
― Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data

“Just as firms will continue to have some, albeit diminished, role to play in the economy, in the future we’ll also still use money, but in data-rich markets money will no longer play first violin. As a result, banks and other financial intermediaries will need to refocus their business models. And they are going to need to move quickly, as a new breed of data-driven financial technology companies, the so-called fintechs, are embracing data-rich markets and challenge the conventional financial services sector. It is easy to see how banking will be severely affected by the decline of money, but the implications are larger, and more profound. At least in part, the role of finance capital rests on the informational function it plays in the economy. But as data takes over from money, capital no longer provides as strong a signal of trust and confidence as it currently does, undermining the belief that capital equates with power that underlies the concept of finance capitalism. Data-richness enables us to disentangle markets and finance capital by furthering the one while depreciating the other. We are about to witness both the rather immediate reconfiguration of the banking and finance sector, and the later but more profound curbing of the role of money, shifting our economy from finance to data capitalism.”
― Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data

“knowing exactly what we want isn’t easy. We may forget an important consideration or erroneously disregard it; for humans, it’s actually quite difficult to articulate our multifaceted needs in a simple, structured way. That’s the third area in which recent technical advancements matter. And today, adaptive systems can learn our preferences over time as they watch what we are doing and track our decisions.”
― Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data