2019 will be the year of data

AI hype is at frenetic levels; will 2019 be the year such hype peaks and starts to fall? ‘Data and Analytics’ remains misunderstood as too many lay folks think it just is a new way to say, Business Intelligence; and Analytics, as in “Data and Analytics” are really seen by many as just the same thing, and not Data, and Analytics. Worse, some economists might even write about data being the new oil of the gig economy or tech revolution. All these views miss the key point.

In the US print Christmas’s edition of the Economist a leader article posed this: A new way to think about data is needed. The article muses about the dichotomy of how more and more of our life works around the assumption that others (mostly companies) use data about us;l to serve us, yet there is then less privacy and more risk that bad things may happen as a result. The article concludes with this sentence:

“But the first step towards ensuring the fairness of the new information age is to understand that it is not data that are valuable. It is you.”

I suspect (and I am not referring to any specific research position here- I am musing only) that by the year the markets interest in AI will be passed its peak. What I mean to say is that the markets love of AI as we know it today will be passed its peak; AI may be reinvented. Today the markets desire for a general purpose technology (GPT) far outstrip the actual ability of AI to deliver predictable value as a special purpose technology (SPT). By Christmas 2019 I suspect our faith and hope in a single GPT will have evaporated, though it maybe replaced with narrower, more successfully SPT applications. The nature of the market however will not be satiated: it always wants bigger and better silver bullets.

With all the public stories of data breaches and leakages it is no surprising that the EU’s GDPR has garnered a lot of attention. In 2018 GDPR was signed onto the statute books.